Journal articles on the topic 'Climatic changes – Ethical aspects – United States'

This article explores the key stages of the development of U.S. policy with regards to Arctic Region. The goal is set to outline the fundamental interests of the United States in the Arctic, as well as analyze the actions aimed at their achievement. The article examines the main priorities in U.S. Arctic policy, namely the protection and preservation of resources and ecosystem in the Arctic Region, scientific study of climatic changes, peculiarities of economic development of Alaska, and national security interests of the state. The questions of interaction of Arctic states with regards to defense cooperation become increasingly relevant. Consideration of the mid-term and long-term prospects of U.S. Arctic policy allowed the author focusing attention on the news aspects of U.S. government actions. Maritime capabilities of the United States in the Arctic waters are views in the context of modern tendencies. The author attempted to trace the prospects for expansion of U.S. influence in the Arctic Region based on the current agenda of 2019.

Scientific advances have enabled thousands of individuals to extend their lives through organ donation. Yet, shortfalls of available organs persist, and individuals in the United States die daily before they receive what might have been lifesaving organs. For years, the legal foundation of organ donation in the United States has been known as the Dead Donor Rule, requiring death to be defined for organ donation purposes by either a cardiac standard (termination of the heartbeat) or a neurological one (cessation of all brain function). In this context, one solution used by an increasing number of health care facilities since 2006 is donation after circulatory death, generally defined as when care is withdrawn from individuals who have known residual brain function. Despite its increased use, donation after circulatory death remains ethically controversial. In addition, some ethicists have advocated forgoing the Dead Donor Rule altogether and allowing donation before or near death in certain circumstances. However, nurses and other health professionals must carefully consider the practical and ethical implications of broadening the Dead Donor Rule—as may be already occurring—or removing it entirely. Such changes could harm both the integrity of the health care system as well as efforts to secure organ donation commitments from the public and are outweighed by the moral and pragmatic cost. Nurses should be prepared to confront the challenge posed by the ongoing scarcity of organs and advocate for ethical alternatives including research on effective care pathways and education regarding organ donation.

Over the last century, droughts have caused more deaths internationally than any other weather- or climate-related disaster. Like other natural disasters, droughts cause significant changes in the environment that can lead to negative health outcomes. As droughts are becoming more frequent and intense with climate change, public health systems need to address impacts associated with these events. Partnering with federal and local entities, we evaluated the state of knowledge of drought and health in the United States through a National Drought and Public Health Summit and a series of subsequent regional workshops. The intended outcome was to develop public health strategies for implementing activities to better support and prepare public health systems for future droughts. The information gathered from this work identified multiple policy and law options to address the public health issues associated with drought. These policy recommendations include the use of public health emergency declarations for drought events, increased usage of preparedness evaluations for drought emergencies, and engagement of drought and climate experts in state and local risk assessments. As drought events are projected to increase in frequency and magnitude with climate change, taking policy action now will help decrease the health impacts of drought and save lives.

The article considers the impact of environmental changes on population migration and security of countries. Theoretical aspects of Environmental migration, in particular its essence and types, are studied. The main directions of scientific research in this field are considered. In particular, much attention is about finding ways to adapt to changes in the environment and minimize the negative consequences of these changes to achieve sustainable development in both regions and countries. The study found that internal population movements are mainly due to climatic factors such as storms and floods. It was determined that in 2019, about 52% of new mixing was caused by storms and 40% - by floods. Countries for which the phenomenon of ecological migration is most characteristic are India, the Philippines, the United States, China, and Indonesia. The main problems that arise in the study of Environmental mobility of the population are identifiedThey are mainly related to the lack of information and statistical base for conducting qualitative and diverse research.

Medicinal cannabis is legal in some form in 47 states, 3 United States territories, and the District of Columbia. An estimated three million Americans use cannabis for relief of a variety of illnesses, and this figure is expected to grow based on policy changes. However, cannabis remains illegal at the federal level as a Schedule I drug under the 1970 Controlled Substances Act. Schedule I classification of cannabis has impeded the advancement of research, leaving providers with little evidence-based information to educate their patients. Furthermore, the disparities in individual state laws create significant social and health inequities in gaining access to medicinal cannabis. Conflicting state and federal policies regarding medicinal cannabis create logistical and ethical dilemmas, and all U.S. stakeholders—patients, providers, and health delivery systems—may be impacted by conflicting federal and state policies. This brief addresses the impact of conflicting cannabis policies.

Abstract Objectives Seasonal cycles in climatic factors such as temperature and precipitation affect the drivers of child growth and contribute to seasonal fluctuations in undernutrition. Current growth seasonality models are limited by categorical definitions of seasons that rely on assumptions about their timing and fail to consider their magnitude. In this study, we disentangle the relationship between climatic factors and growth indicators, using harmonic regression models to determine how child growth is related to peaks in temperature, precipitation, and vegetation. Methods Longitudinal anthropometric data collected between August 2014-December 2016 from 5,039 Burkinabè children measured monthly from age 6–28 months were linked with remotely sensed daily precipitation, vegetation, and maximum air temperature. Using harmonic regression models, we compared the magnitude and timing of seasonal peaks in climatic factors and morbidity with that of nadirs in growth velocity (cm/month, kg/month). Results Length and weight velocity were slowest twice a year, coinciding both times with the highest temperatures, as rains start and end, and with peak fever and diarrhea incidence. Conclusions Our results suggest that child health and development are more affected by high temperatures than by other aspects of climatic seasonality such as rainfall. Pathogens causing diarrheal disease and fever thrive and have more opportunities to infect children while temperatures are high, and precipitation is low. Emerging shifts in climatic conditions will pose challenges to optimal growth, highlighting the importance of programmatic and policy-level changes that optimize timing of nutrition interventions and address environmental growth-limiting conditions. Funding Sources United States Agency for International Development.

Background: Ethics education is essential to the education of all healthcare professionals. The purpose of this study was to evaluate an interprofessional approach to ethics education to all students across an academic health science center. Research objectives: The objectives were to (1) compare student perception of ethics education before and after the implementation of the campus-wide ethics program and (2) determine changes in student ethical decision-making skills following implementation of a campus-wide ethics program. Research design: This study was a quasi-experimental design with seniors graduating prior to the intervention serving as the control group. Participants and research context: The setting was a comprehensive health science center in the southwestern United States. All students enrolled in the university participated in the intervention; however, 976 graduating students were used for evaluation of the intervention. Ethical considerations: Study materials for each survey were submitted to the university’s IRB, and the project was approved as exempt by the Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects. Student participation in the surveys was voluntary. No names or other identifying information were collected, and responses to the survey questions were kept confidential. Findings: Students’ perception of the adequacy of time spent on the ethics content in course instruction and practical training decreased from the baseline to the fifth-year survey. Students’ overall comfort level with their abilities to deal with ethical issues increased from the baseline to the fifth year. Student ethical decision-making skills were higher at the third-year evaluation for all indicators. For the fifth-year survey, responses were also higher scoring on all four indicators. Discussion: After participation in an interprofessional campus-wide effort on health professions ethics, students demonstrated higher ethical decision-making scores according to the Health Professional Ethics Rubric. However, their scores still did not reach the proficiency level identified in the rubric. Conclusion: Examination of the effectiveness of each part of the intervention is needed.

Abstract Knickpoints in longitudinal river profiles are proxies for the climatic and tectonic history of active mountains. The analysis of river profiles commonly relies on the assumption that drainage network configurations are stable. Here, we show that this assumption must be made cautiously if changes in contributing area are fast relative to knickpoint migration rates. We studied the Parachute Creek basin in the Roan Plateau, Colorado, United States, where knickpoint retreat occurs in horizontally uniform lithology so that drainage area is the sole governing variable. In this basin, we identified an anomalous catchment in the degree to which a stream power–based model predicted knickpoint locations. The catchment is experiencing area loss as the plateau edge is eroded by cliff migration in proximity to the Colorado River. Model predictions improve if the plateau edge is assumed to have migrated over the time scale of knickpoint retreat. Finally, a Lagrangian model of knickpoint migration enabled us to study the kinematic links between drainage area loss and knickpoint migration and offered constraints on the temporal aspects of area loss. Modeled onset and amount of area loss are consistent with cliff retreat rates along the margin of the Roan Plateau inferred from the incisional history of the upper Colorado River.

This paper is meant to study the apocalyptic scenario of the at the perspectives of the Great Acceleration. the apocalyptic scenario is not a pure imagination of the literature works. Instead, scientific evidences are in favour of dramatic change in the climatic conditions related to the climax of Man actions. the modelling of the future climate leads to horrible situations including intolerable temperatures, dryness, tornadoes, and noticeable sear level rise evading coastal regions. Going far from these scientific claims, Homo Sapiens Sapiens extended his imagination through the Climate-Fiction (cli-fi) to propose a dramatic end. Climate Fiction is developed into a recording machine containing every kind of fictions that depict environmental condition events and has consequently lost its true significance. Introduction The Great Acceleration may be considered as the Late Anthropocene in which Man actions reached their climax to lead to dramatic climatic changes paving the way for a possible apocalyptic scenario threatening the existence of the humanity. So, the apocalyptic scenario is not a pure imagination of the literature works. Instead, many scientific arguments especially related to climate change are in favour of the apocalypse1. As a matter of fact, the modelling of the future climate leads to horrible situations including intolerable temperatures (In 06/07/2021, Kuwait recorded the highest temperature of 53.2 °C), dryness, tornadoes, and noticeable sear level rise evading coastal regions. These conditions taking place during the Great Acceleration would have direct repercussions on the human species. Considering that the apocalyptic extinction had really caused the disappearance of many stronger species including dinosaurs, Homo Sapiens Sapiens extended his imagination though the Climate-Fiction (cli-fi) to propose a dramatic end due to severe climate conditions intolerable by the humankind. The mass extinction of animal species has occurred several times over the geological ages. Researchers have a poor understanding of the causes and processes of these major crises1. Nonetheless, whatever the cause of extinction, the apocalyptic scenario has always been present in the geological history. For example, dinosaurs extinction either by asteroids impact or climate changes could by no means denies the apocalyptic aspect2.At the same time as them, many animal and plant species became extinct, from marine or flying reptiles to marine plankton. This biological crisis of sixty-five million years ago is not the only one that the biosphere has suffered. It was preceded and followed by other crises which caused the extinction or the rarefaction of animal species. So, it is undeniable that many animal groups have disappeared. It is even on the changes of fauna that the geologists of the last century have based themselves to establish the scale of geological times, scale which is still used. But it is no less certain that the extinction processes, extremely complex, are far from being understood. We must first agree on the meaning of the word "extinction", namely on the apocalyptic aspect of the concept. It is quite understood that, without disappearances, the evolution of species could not have followed its course. Being aware that the apocalyptic extinction had massacred stronger species that had dominated the planet, Homo Sapiens Sapiens has been aware that the possibility of apocalyptic end at the perspective of the Anthropocene (i.e., Great Acceleration) could not be excluded. This conviction is motivated by the progressive defaunation in some regions3and the appearance of alien species in others related to change of mineralogy and geochemistry4 leading to a climate change during the Anthropocene. These scientific claims fed the vast imagination about climate change to set the so-called cli-fi. The concept of the Anthropocene is the new geological era which begins when the Man actions have reached a sufficient power to modify the geological processes and climatic cycles of the planet5. The Anthropocene by no means excludes the possibility of an apocalyptic horizon, namely in the perspectives of the Great Acceleration. On the contrary, two scenarios do indeed seem to dispute the future of the Anthropocene, with a dramatic cross-charge. The stories of the end of the world are as old as it is, as the world is the origin of these stories. However, these stories of the apocalypse have evolved over time and, since the beginning of the 19th century, they have been nourished particularly by science and its advances. These fictions have sometimes tried to pass themselves off as science. This is the current vogue, called collapsology6. This end is more than likely cli-fi driven7and it may cause the extinction of the many species including the Homo Sapiens Sapiens. In this vein, Anthropocene defaunation has become an ultimate reality8. More than one in eight birds, more than one in five mammals, more than one in four coniferous species, one in three amphibians are threatened. The hypothesis of a hierarchy within the living is induced by the error of believing that evolution goes from the simplest to the most sophisticated, from the inevitably stupid inferior to the superior endowed with an intelligence giving prerogative to all powers. Evolution goes in all directions and pursues no goal except the extension of life on Earth. Evolution certainly does not lead from bacteria to humans, preferably male and white. Our species is only a carrier of the DNA that precedes us and that will survive us. Until we show a deep respect for the biosphere particularly, and our planet in general, we will not become much, we will remain a predator among other predators, the fiercest of predators, the almighty craftsman of the Anthropocene. To be in the depths of our humanity, somehow giving back to the biosphere what we have taken from it seems obvious. To stop the sixth extinction of species, we must condemn our anthropocentrism and the anthropization of the territories that goes with it. The other forms of life also need to keep their ecological niches. According to the first, humanity seems at first to withdraw from the limits of the planet and ultimately succumb to them, with a loss of dramatic meaning. According to the second, from collapse to collapse, it is perhaps another humanity, having overcome its demons, that could come. Climate fiction is a literary sub-genre dealing with the theme of climate change, including global warming. The term appears to have been first used in 2008 by blogger and writer Dan Bloom. In October 2013, Angela Evancie, in a review of the novel Odds against Tomorrow, by Nathaniel Rich, wonders if climate change has created a new literary genre. Scientific basis of the apocalyptic scenario in the perspective of the Anthropocene Global warming All temperature indices are in favour of a global warming (Fig.1). According to the different scenarios of the IPCC9, the temperatures of the globe could increase by 2 °C to 5 °C by 2100. But some scientists warn about a possible runaway of the warming which can reach more than 3 °C. Thus, the average temperature on the surface of the globe has already increased by more than 1.1 °C since the pre-industrial era. The rise in average temperatures at the surface of the globe is the first expected and observed consequence of massive greenhouse gas emissions. However, meteorological surveys record positive temperature anomalies which are confirmed from year to year compared to the temperatures recorded since the middle of the 19th century. Climatologists point out that the past 30 years have seen the highest temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere for over 1,400 years. Several climatic centres around the world record, synthesize and follow the evolution of temperatures on Earth. Since the beginning of the 20th century (1906-2005), the average temperature at the surface of the globe has increased by 0.74 °C, but this progression has not been continuous since 1976, the increase has clearly accelerated, reaching 0.19 °C per decade according to model predictions. Despite the decline in solar activity, the period 1997-2006 is marked by an average positive anomaly of 0.53 °C in the northern hemisphere and 0.27 °C in the southern hemisphere, still compared to the normal calculated for 1961-1990. The ten hottest years on record are all after 1997. Worse, 14 of the 15 hottest years are in the 21st century, which has barely started. Thus, 2016 is the hottest year, followed closely by 2015, 2014 and 2010. The temperature of tropical waters increased by 1.2 °C during the 20th century (compared to 0.5 °C on average for the oceans), causing coral reefs to bleach in 1997. In 1998, the period of Fort El Niño, the prolonged warming of the water has destroyed half of the coral reefs of the Indian Ocean. In addition, the temperature in the tropics of the five ocean basins, where cyclones form, increased by 0.5 °C from 1970 to 2004, and powerful cyclones appeared in the North Atlantic in 2005, while they were more numerous in other parts of the world. Recently, mountains of studies focused on the possible scenario of climate change and the potential worldwide repercussions including hell temperatures and apocalyptic extreme events10 , 11, 12. Melting of continental glaciers As a direct result of the global warming, melting of continental glaciers has been recently noticed13. There are approximately 198,000 mountain glaciers in the world; they cover an area of approximately 726,000 km2. If they all melted, the sea level would rise by about 40 cm. Since the late 1960s, global snow cover has declined by around 10 to 15%. Winter cold spells in much of the northern half of the northern hemisphere are two weeks shorter than 100 years ago. Glaciers of mountains have been declining all over the world by an average of 50 m per decade for 150 years. However, they are also subject to strong multi-temporal variations which make forecasts on this point difficult according to some specialists. In the Alps, glaciers have been losing 1 meter per year for 30 years. Polar glaciers like those of Spitsbergen (about a hundred km from the North Pole) have been retreating since 1880, releasing large quantities of water. The Arctic has lost about 10% of its permanent ice cover every ten years since 1980. In this region, average temperatures have increased at twice the rate of elsewhere in the world in recent decades. The melting of the Arctic Sea ice has resulted in a loss of 15% of its surface area and 40% of its thickness since 1979. The record for melting arctic sea ice was set in 2017. All models predict the disappearance of the Arctic Sea ice in summer within a few decades, which will not be without consequences for the climate in Europe. The summer melting of arctic sea ice accelerated far beyond climate model predictions. Added to its direct repercussions of coastal regions flooding, melting of continental ice leads to radical climatic modifications in favour of the apocalyptic scenario. Fig.1 Evolution of temperature anomaly from 1880 to 2020: the apocalyptic scenario Sea level rise As a direct result of the melting of continental glaciers, sea level rise has been worldwide recorded14 ,15. The average level of the oceans has risen by 22 cm since 1880 and 2 cm since the year 2000 because of the melting of the glaciers but also with the thermal expansion of the water. In the 20th century, the sea level rose by around 2 mm per year. From 1990 to 2017, it reached the relatively constant rate of just over 3mm per year. Several sources contributed to sea level increase including thermal expansion of water (42%), melting of continental glaciers (21%), melting Greenland glaciers (15%) and melting Antarctic glaciers (8%). Since 2003, there has always been a rapid rise (around 3.3 mm / year) in sea level, but the contribution of thermal expansion has decreased (0.4 mm / year) while the melting of the polar caps and continental glaciers accelerates. Since most of the world’s population is living on coastal regions, sea level rise represents a real threat for the humanity, not excluding the apocalyptic scenario. Multiplication of extreme phenomena and climatic anomalies On a human scale, an average of 200 million people is affected by natural disasters each year and approximately 70,000 perish from them. Indeed, as evidenced by the annual reviews of disasters and climatic anomalies, we are witnessing significant warning signs. It is worth noting that these observations are dependent on meteorological survey systems that exist only in a limited number of countries with statistics that rarely go back beyond a century or a century and a half. In addition, scientists are struggling to represent the climatic variations of the last two thousand years which could serve as a reference in the projections. Therefore, the exceptional nature of this information must be qualified a little. Indeed, it is still difficult to know the return periods of climatic disasters in each region. But over the last century, the climate system has gone wild. Indeed, everything suggests that the climate is racing. Indeed, extreme events and disasters have become more frequent. For instance, less than 50 significant events were recorded per year over the period 1970-1985, while there have been around 120 events recorded since 1995. Drought has long been one of the most worrying environmental issues. But while African countries have been the main affected so far, the whole world is now facing increasingly frequent and prolonged droughts. Chile, India, Australia, United States, France and even Russia are all regions of the world suffering from the acceleration of the global drought. Droughts are slowly evolving natural hazards that can last from a few months to several decades and affect larger or smaller areas, whether they are small watersheds or areas of hundreds of thousands of square kilometres. In addition to their direct effects on water resources, agriculture and ecosystems, droughts can cause fires or heat waves. They also promote the proliferation of invasive species, creating environments with multiple risks, worsening the consequences on ecosystems and societies, and increasing their vulnerability. Although these are natural phenomena, there is a growing understanding of how humans have amplified the severity and impacts of droughts, both on the environment and on people. We influence meteorological droughts through our action on climate change, and we influence hydrological droughts through our management of water circulation and water processes at the local scale, for example by diverting rivers or modifying land use. During the Anthropocene (the present period when humans exert a dominant influence on climate and environment), droughts are closely linked to human activities, cultures, and responses. From this scientific overview, it may be concluded apocalyptic scenario is not only a literature genre inspired from the pure imagination. Instead, many scientific arguments are in favour of this dramatic destiny of Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Fig.2. Sea level rise from 1880 to 2020: a possible apocalyptic scenario (www.globalchange.gov, 2021) Apocalyptic genre in recent writing As the original landmark of apocalyptic writing, we must place the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in 587 BC and the Exile in Babylon. Occasion of a religious and cultural crossing with imprescriptible effects, the Exile brought about a true rebirth, characterized by the maintenance of the essential ethical, even cultural, of a national religion, that of Moses, kept as pure as possible on a foreign land and by the reinterpretation of this fundamental heritage by the archaic return of what was very old, both national traditions and neighbouring cultures. More precisely, it was the place and time for the rehabilitation of cultures and the melting pot for recasting ancient myths. This vast infatuation with Antiquity, remarkable even in the vocabulary used, was not limited to Israel: it even largely reflected a general trend. The long period that preceded throughout the 7th century BC and until 587, like that prior to the edict of Cyrus in 538 BC, was that of restorations and rebirths, of returns to distant sources and cultural crossings. In the biblical literature of this period, one is struck by the almost systematic link between, on the one hand, a very sustained mythical reinvestment even in form and, on the other, the frequent use of biblical archaisms. The example of Shadday, a word firmly rooted in the Semites of the Northwest and epithet of El in the oldest layers of the books of Genesis and Exodus, is most eloquent. This term reappears precisely at the time of the Exile as a designation of the divinity of the Patriarchs and of the God of Israel; Daily, ecological catastrophes now describe the normal state of societies exposed to "risks", in the sense that Ulrich Beck gives to this term: "the risk society is a society of catastrophe. The state of emergency threatens to become a normal state there1”. Now, the "threat" has become clearer, and catastrophic "exceptions" are proliferating as quickly as species are disappearing and climate change is accelerating. The relationship that we have with this worrying reality, to say the least, is twofold: on the one hand, we know very well what is happening to us; on the other hand, we fail to draw the appropriate theoretical and political consequences. This ecological duplicity is at the heart of what has come to be called the “Anthropocene”, a term coined at the dawn of the 21st century by Eugene Stoermer (an environmentalist) and Paul Crutzen (a specialist in the chemistry of the atmosphere) in order to describe an age when humanity would have become a "major geological force" capable of disrupting the climate and changing the terrestrial landscape from top to bottom. If the term “Anthropocene” takes note of human responsibility for climate change, this responsibility is immediately attributed to overpowering: strong as we are, we have “involuntarily” changed the climate for at least two hundred and fifty years. Therefore, let us deliberately change the face of the Earth, if necessary, install a solar shield in space. Recognition and denial fuel the signifying machine of the Anthropocene. And it is precisely what structures eco-apocalyptic cinema that this article aims to study. By "eco-apocalyptic cinema", we first mean a cinematographic sub-genre: eco-apocalyptic and post-eco-apocalyptic films base the possibility (or reality) of the end of the world on environmental grounds and not, for example, on damage caused by the possible collision of planet Earth with a comet. Post-apocalyptic science fiction (sometimes abbreviated as "post-apo" or "post-nuke") is a sub-genre of science fiction that depicts life after a disaster that destroyed civilization: nuclear war, collision with a meteorite, epidemic, economic or energy crisis, pandemic, alien invasion. Conclusion Climate and politics have been linked together since Aristotle. With Montesquieu, Ibn Khaldûn or Watsuji, a certain climatic determinism is attributed to the character of a nation. The break with modernity made the climate an object of scientific knowledge which, in the twentieth century, made it possible to document, despite the controversies, the climatic changes linked to industrialization. Both endanger the survival of human beings and ecosystems. Climate ethics are therefore looking for a new relationship with the biosphere or Gaia. For some, with the absence of political agreements, it is the beginning of inevitable catastrophes. For others, the Anthropocene, which henceforth merges human history with natural history, opens onto technical action. The debate between climate determinism and human freedom is revived. The reference to the biblical Apocalypse was present in the thinking of thinkers like Günther Anders, Karl Jaspers or Hans Jonas: the era of the atomic bomb would mark an entry into the time of the end, a time marked by the unprecedented human possibility of 'total war and annihilation of mankind. The Apocalypse will be very relevant in describing the chaos to come if our societies continue their mad race described as extra-activist, productivist and consumerist. In dialogue with different theologians and philosophers (such as Jacques Ellul), it is possible to unveil some spiritual, ethical, and political resources that the Apocalypse offers for thinking about History and human engagement in the Anthropocene. What can a theology of collapse mean at a time when negative signs and dead ends in the human situation multiply? What then is the place of man and of the cosmos in the Apocalypse according to Saint John? Could the end of history be a collapse? How can we live in the time we have left before the disaster? Answers to such questions remain unknown and no scientist can predict the trajectory of this Great Acceleration taking place at the Late Anthropocene. When science cannot give answers, Man tries to infer his destiny for the legend, religion and the fiction. Climate Fiction is developed into a recording machine containing every kind of fictions that depict environmental condition events and has consequently lost its true significance. Aware of the prospect of ecological collapse additionally as our apparent inability to avert it, we tend to face geology changes of forceful proportions that severely challenge our ability to imagine the implications. Climate fiction ought to be considered an important supplement to climate science, as a result, climate fiction makes visible and conceivable future modes of existence inside worlds not solely deemed seemingly by science, however that area unit scientifically anticipated. 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Nature communications 11, no. 1 (Nature Publishing Group 2020): 1-11.

The article spans the growth of journalism as a profession, analyzes the process of its institutionalization in Europe, the USA and in Russia at the turn of the 19th – 20th centuries. The focus of the article is the genesis and development of professional organizations associated with internal corporate professional reflection. The journalism as a profession was established and recognized by society and the professional community almost simultaneously in European countries, in the USA, and in Russia, in the late 19th – early 20th centuries. At the same period significant changes shocked the economic, political and social spheres of these countries. Strengthening the activities of trade unions, the spontaneous struggle of workers for their rights led almost everywhere to an increase in wages and a decrease in the length of the working day. Technical innovations improved the process of collecting and disseminating information. All these above-mentioned factors encouraged the rapid development of the mass press. Publishers and journalists faced a major challenge since society demands for journalism, as one of the most public professions, at that time was extremely high, but journalists and professional community did not meet them well. The article studies the goals and functions declared by public professional journalistic organizations. As a result of investigation the author identifies several types among these institutions: organizations that maintained and broadcasted ethical and professional standards; organizations that fought for the rights of members of the corporation; organizations that provided financial support to members of the corporation; organizations that provided training for journalists; organizations that solved commercial, business problems through the intercorporate cooperation, protection of commercial interests in relations with the state. Organizations from different countries gave priority to various aspects of journalistic activity. Whereas the first European professional journalism organizations usually joined forces of the editors, journalists, and publishers to solve ethical and social problems, in the United States commercial interests and professional ethics came to the fore, so the fight for the rights and struggle for freedom of speech were far less important. The experience of journalists of the “Progressive Era” and the “Muckrakers” indicates that this is primarily due to the characteristics of political system and traditions of the country. In Russia, the process of institutionalization of corporate relations developed in accordance with global trends, but, unlike them, under state control. The main functions of professional associations were supporting members financially, establishing and codifying ethical standards.

In the Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications version 2 (MERRA-2) system the land is forced by replacing the model-generated precipitation with observed precipitation before it reaches the surface. This approach is motivated by the expectation that the resultant improvements in soil moisture will lead to improved land surface latent heating (LH). Here aspects of the MERRA-2 land surface energy budget and 2-m air temperatures [Formula: see text] are assessed. For global land annual averages, MERRA-2 appears to overestimate the LH (by 5 W m−2), the sensible heating (by 6 W m−2), and the downwelling shortwave radiation (by 14 W m−2) while underestimating the downwelling and upwelling (absolute) longwave radiation (by 10–15 W m−2 each). These results differ only slightly from those for NASA’s previous reanalysis, MERRA. Comparison to various gridded reference datasets over boreal summer (June–August) suggests that MERRA-2 has particularly large positive biases (>20 W m−2) where LH is energy limited and that these biases are associated with evaporative fraction biases rather than radiation biases. For time series of monthly means during boreal summer, the globally averaged anomaly correlations [Formula: see text] with reference data were improved from MERRA to MERRA-2, for LH (from 0.39 to 0.48 vs Global Land Evaporation Amsterdam Model data) and the daily maximum T2m (from 0.69 to 0.75 vs Climatic Research Unit data). In regions where [Formula: see text] is particularly sensitive to the precipitation corrections (including the central United States, the Sahel, and parts of South Asia), the changes in the [Formula: see text] [Formula: see text] are relatively large, suggesting that the observed precipitation influenced the [Formula: see text] performance.

Fiction writers who are engaged in science is a phenomenon. We studied this phenomenon to gain new opportunities for the development of soft skills in students of technical specialties and to widen the possibility of popularizing scientific achievements. The chronological boundaries of the study cover the period of XVIII – the first half of XX century; geographical boundaries cover Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States. The relevance of the study is related to the relevance of popularizing science among students of technical specialties, as well as the development of soft skills through writing stories about scientific discoveries, fostering interest in reading fiction about science and technology. The purpose of the study was to find psychological and informational material that will affect the emotional sphere of the student's personality and motivate him to write and read works of art about research and innovation. The ability to use research on the role of writers as promoters of science and technology depends on how we provide information about their works. In this regard, we offer a psychological technique to impress readers of scientific stories, i.e. the effect of “wow” as a combination of the factor “wow” and the halo effect. Stories about science affect different areas of human activity. They are used to address environmental, medical, political and other issues. The information material of the study confirms the following: if scientists and inventors do not demonstrate the consequences of their inventions and discoveries, it leads to erroneous assumptions, causes alarm in society and affects the mind of the individual. We studied the nature of writers' connection to science and sought answers to the question of whether writing works of art and the ability to do research could be equal aspects of an individual's abilities. The results of the study prove that these abilities predominate in only one area of activity. We also support the view that writers can be impartial promoters of science and technology. However, we propose this idea for discussion because writers demonstrate more the ethical side of the interaction between science and the human mind than they disseminate scientific facts. The further development of the study will be related to the study of the influence of science fiction on consciousness, namely how science fiction informs the reader about the current state of the world and draws attention to the changes we must make as a species.

Physicians in the United States have been affected by significant changes in the pattern(s) of medical practice evolving over the last several decades. These changes include new measures to 1) curb increasing costs, 2) increase access to patient care, 3) improve quality of healthcare, and 4) pay for prescription drugs. Escalating healthcare costs have focused concerns about the financial solvency of Medicare and this in turn has fostered a renewed interest in the economic basis of interventional pain management practices. The provision and systemization of healthcare in North America and several European countries are difficult enterprises to manage irrespective of whether these provisions and systems are privatized (as in the United States) or nationalized or semi-nationalized (as in Great Britain, Canada, Australia and France). Consequently, while many management options have been put forth, none seem to be optimally geared toward affording healthcare as a maximized individual and social good, and none have been completely enacted. The current physician fee schedule (released on July 12, 2007) includes a 9.9% cut in payment rate. Since the Medicare program was created in 1965, several methods have been used to determine physicians’ rate(s) for each covered service. The sustained growth rate (SGR) system, established in 1998, has evoked negative consequences on physician payment(s). Based on the current Medicare expenditure index, practice expenses are projected to increase by 34.5% from 2002 to 2016, whereas, if actual practice inflation is considered, this increase will be 90%. This is in contrast to projected physician payment cuts that are depicted to be 51%. No doubt, this scenario will be devastating to many practices and the US medical community at large. Resolutions to this problem have been offered by MedPAC, the Government Accountability Office, physician organizations, economists, and various other interested groups. In the past, temporary measures have been proposed (and sometimes implemented) to eliminate physician payment cuts. At present, the US Senate and House of Representatives are separately working on 2 different mechanisms to address and rectify these cost-payment discrepancies. The effects of both the problem and the potential solutions on interventional pain management may be somewhat greater than those on other specialties. Physician payments in interventional pain management may evidence cuts of 10% to 15%, whereas if procedures are performed in an office setting, such cuts may range from 29% to 39% over the period of the next 3 years if the proposed 9.9% cut is not reversed. Medicare cuts also impact other insurance payments, incurring a “ripple effect” such that many insurers will seek to pay at or around the Medicare rate. In this manuscript, we discuss universal healthcare systems, the CMS proposed ruling and its attendant ripple effect(s), historical aspects of the Medicare payment system, the Sustained Growth Rate system, and the potential consequences incurred by both proposed cuts and potential solutions to the discrepant cost-payment issue(s). As well, ethical issues of policy development upon the infrastructure and practice of interventional pain management are addressed. Key words: Health policy, physician payment policy, physician fee schedule, Medicare, sustained growth rate formula, interventional pain management, regulatory reform, ethics

A review article devoted to the book of Andrzej Blikle – Doktryna jakości. Rzecz o skutecznym zarządzaniu. As pointed out by the Author, the book is a case of a work rare on the Polish publishing market, written by an outstanding scientist, who successfully runs a business activity. The combination of practical experience with theoretical knowledge gave a result that may be satisfying both for practitioners as well as theorists, and also those who want to get to know the ins and outs of an effective and efficient business management. The Author of the review believes that it is an important voice for shaping an inclusive socio-economic system, which constitutes a value in itself. Although the book is mainly concerned with business management, its message has a much wider dimension and is concerned with real measures of wealth, money and people’s lives. The book was awarded The SGH Collegium of Business Administration Award “For the best scientific work in the field of business administration in the years 2014-2015”. Andrzej Jacek Blikle Doktryna jakości. Rzecz o skutecznym zarządzaniu (The Doctrine of Quality. On Effective Management) Gliwice, Helion Publishing Company, 2014, p. 546 Introduction One of the distinctive features of the contemporary economy and contemporary world is a kind of obsession of quantity which is related to thoughtless consumerism, unfavourable to the care for the quality of the work and the quality of the produced and consumed goods and services. It is accompanied by culture (or rather non-culture) of singleness. Therefore, the book The Doctrine of Quality by Andrzej Blikle is like a breath of fresh air. It is a different perspective on the economy and the model of operation of enterprises, on the model of work and life of people. A. Blikle proves that it can be done otherwise. He proves it on the basis of careful studies of the source literature – as expected from a professor of mathematics and an economist, but also on the basis of his own experience gained during the scientific and educational work, and most of all through the economic practice. In the world governed by the obsession of quantity, characterised by fragility, shortness of human relationships, including the relationship of the entrepreneur – employee, A. Blikle chooses durability of these relations, creativity, responsibility, quality of work and production, and ethics. The Doctrine of Quality is a rare example of the work on the Polish publishing market, whose author is a prominent scientist, successfully conducting a business activity for more than two decades, which has contributed to the development of the family company – a known confectionery brand “A. Blikle”. The combination of practical experience with theoretical knowledge gave a result that may be satisfying both for practitioners as well as theorists, and also those who want to get to know the ins and outs of an effective and efficient business management, or develop the knowledge on this topic. In an attractive, clear narrative form, the author comprehensively presents the complexities of business management, indicating the sources of success, but also the reasons and the foundations of failures. At the same time, he presents these issues with an interdisciplinary approach, which contributes to thoroughness of the arguments and deeper reflections. Holism, typical to this book, is also expressed in the focus of A. Blikle not only on the economic, but also on social and ecological issues. Here, the author points to the possibility and need of reconciliation of the economic interests with social interests, and the care for the public good. Analyses of this subject are presented using the achievements of many areas of studies, in addition to economic sciences, including mathematics, sociology, psychology, medicine, and others. This gives a comprehensive picture of the complexity of business management – taking into account its close and distant environment. There are no longueurs in the book, although extensive (over 500 pages), or lengthy, or even unnecessary reasoning overwhelming the reader, as the text is illustrated with a number of examples from practice, and coloured with anecdotes. At the same time, the author does not avoid using expressions popular in the world of (not only) business. He proves that a motivational system which is not based on the approach of “carrot and stick” and without a devastating competition of a “rat race” is possible. The author supports his arguments with references not only to the interdisciplinary scientific achievements, but also to the economic historical experiences and to a variety of older and newer business models. There is a clear fascination with the reserves of creativity and productivity in the humanization of work. In fact, the author strongly exposes the potential of productivity and creativity in creating the conditions and atmosphere of work fostering elimination of fear of the future. He shows that such fear destroys creativity. It is not a coincidence that A. Blikle refers to the Fordist principles, including the warning that manufacturing and business do not consist of cheap buying and expensive selling. He reminds that Henry Ford, a legendary creator of the development of the automotive industry in the United States, put serving the public before the profit. The Doctrine of Quality is at the same time a book – proof that one of the most dangerous misconceptions or errors in the contemporary understanding of economics is finding that it is a science of making money, chremastics. Edmund Phelps and others warned against this in the year of the outbreak of the financial crisis in the USA in 2008, reminding that economics is not a science of making money but a science of relations between the economy and social life [Phelps, 2008]. Economics is a science of people in the process of management. Therefore, by definition, it applies to social values and ethos. Ethos is a general set of values, standards and models of proceedings adopted by a particular group of people. In this sense, ethos and economics as a science of people in the process of management are inseparable. Detaching economics from morality is in contradiction to the classical Smithian concept of economics, as Adam Smith combined the idea of the free market with morality. He treated his first work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, as an inseparable basis for deliberations on the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, which was the subject of the subsequent work of this thinker [Smith, 1989; Smith, 2012]. Identifying economics with chremastics would then mean that all actions are acceptable and desired, if their outcome is earnings, profit, money. The book of A. Blikle denies it. It contains a number of case studies, which also stimulate broader reflections. Therefore, and also due to the features indicated above, it can be a very useful teaching aid in teaching entrepreneurship and management. The appearance of a book promoting the doctrine of quality and exposing the meaning of ethos of work is especially important because today the phenomenon of product adulteration becomes increasingly widespread, which is ironically referred to in literature as the “gold-plating” of products [Sennett, 2010, pp. 115-118], and the trend as “antifeatures”, that is intentionally limiting the efficiency and durability of products of daily use to create demand for new products. A model example of antifeature is a sim-lock installed in some telephones which makes it impossible to use SIM cards of foreign operators [Rohwetter, 2011, p. 48; Miszewski, 2013]. These types of negative phenomena are also promoted by the development of systemic solutions aiming at the diffusion of responsibility [Sennett, 2010]. This issue is presented among others by Nassim N.N. Taleb, in the book with a meaningful title Antifragile: How to Live in a World We Don’t Understand? The author proves that the economy and society lose their natural durability as a result of the introduction of numerous tools and methods of insurance against risks, but mostly by shifting the burden of risks on other entities [Taleb, 2012]. N.N. Taleb illustrates his arguments with numerous convincing examples and references to history, recalling, inter alia, that in ancient times there was no building control, but the constructors, e.g. of bridges had to sleep under them for some time after their construction, and the ancient aqueducts are still working well until today. So, he shows that a contemporary world, focused on quantitative effects, does not create a sound base for ethical behaviours and the care for the quality of work and manufacturing. Andrzej Blikle points to the need and possibility of opposing this, and opposing to what the Noble Price Winner for Economics, Joseph Stiglitz described as avarice triumphs over prudence [Stiglitz, 2015, p. 277]. The phrase emphasised in the book “Live and work with a purpose” is the opposition to the dangerous phenomena listed above, such as for example antifeatures. convincing that although the business activity is essentially focused on profits, making money, limited to this, it would be led to the syndrome of King Midas, who wanted to turn everything he touched into gold, but he soon realised that he was at risk of dying of starvation, as even the food turned into gold. What distinguishes this book is that almost every part of it forces in-depth reflections on the social and economic relations and brings to mind the works of other authors, but at the same time, creates a new context for them. So, A. Blikle clearly proves that both the economy and businesses need social rooting. This corresponds to the theses of the Hungarian intellectual Karl Polanyi, who in his renowned work The Great Transformation, already in 1944 argued that the economy is not rooted in the social relations [Polanyi, 2010, p. 70]. He pointed to the risk resulting from commodification of everything, and warned that allowing the market mechanism and competition to control the human life and environment would result in disintegration of society. Although K. Polanyi’s warnings were concerned with the industrial civilization, they are still valid, even now – when the digital revolution brings fundamental changes, among others, on the labour market – they strengthen it. The dynamics of these changes is so high that it seems that the thesis of Jeremy Rifkin on the end of work [Rifkin, 2003] becomes more plausible. It is also confirmed by recent analyses included in the book of this author, concerning the society of zero marginal cost and sharing economy [Rifkin, 2016], and the analyses concerning uberisation [Uberworld, 2016]. The book of Andrzej Blikle also evokes one of the basic asymmetries of the contemporary world, which is the inadequacy of the dynamics and sizes of the supply of products and services to the dynamics and sizes of the demand for them. Insufficient demand collides with the rapidly increasing, as a result of technological changes, possibilities of growth of production and services. This leads to overproduction and related therewith large negative implications, with features of wasteful economy of excess [Kornai, 2014]. It is accompanied by phenomena with features of some kind of market bulimia, sick consumerism, detrimental both to people and the environment [Rist, 2015]. One of the more compromising signs of the economy of excess and wasting of resources is wasting of food by rich countries, when simultaneously, there are areas of hunger in some parts of the world [Stuart, 2009]. At the same time, the economy of excess does not translate to the comfort of the buyers of goods – as in theory attributed to the consumer market. It is indicated in the publication of Janos Kornai concerning a comparative analysis of the features of socio-economic systems. While exposing his deep critical evaluation of socialist non-market systems, as economies of constant deficiency, he does not spare critical opinions on the capitalist economy of excess, with its quest for the growth of the gross domestic product (GDP) and profits. As an example of the economy of excess, he indicates the pharmaceutical industry, with strong monopolistic competition, dynamic innovativeness, wide selection for the buyers, flood of advertisements, manipulation of customers, and often bribing the doctors prescribing products [Kornai 2014, p. 202]. This type of abnormalities is not alien to other industries. Although J. Konrai appreciates that in the economy of excess, including the excess of production capacities, the excess is “grease” calming down and soothing clashes that occur in the mechanisms of adaptation, he also sees that those who claim that in the economy of excess (or more generally in the market economy), sovereignty of consumers dominates, exaggerate [Kornai, 2014, pp. 171-172], as the manufacturers, creating the supply, manipulate the consumers. Thus, there is an excess of supply – both of values as well as junk [Kornai, 2014, p. 176]. Analysing the economy of excess, J. Kornai brings this issue to the question of domination and subordination. It corresponds with the opinion of Jerzy Wilkin, according to whom, the free market can also enslave, so take away individual freedom; on the other hand, the lack of the free market can lead to enslavement as well. Economists willingly talk about the free market, and less about the free man [Wilkin, 2014, p. 4]. The economy of excess is one of the consequences of making a fetish of the economic growth and its measure, which is the gross domestic product (GDP) and treating it as the basis of social and economic activity. In such a system, the pressure of growth is created, so you must grow to avoid death! The system is thus comparable to a cyclist, who has to move forwards to keep his balance [Rist, 2015, p. 181]. It corresponds with the known, unflattering to economists, saying of Kenneth E. Boulding [1956], criticising the focus of economics on the economic growth, while ignoring social implications and consequences to the environment: Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist. [from: Rist, 2015, p. 268]. GDP is a very much needed or even indispensable measure for evaluation of the material level of the economies of individual countries and for comparing their economic health. However, it is insufficient for evaluation of the real level of welfare and quality of life. It requires supplementation with other measures, as it takes into account only the values created by the market purchase and sale transactions. It reflects only the market results of the activity of enterprises and households. Additionally, the GDP account threats the socially desirable and not desirable activities equally. Thus, the market activity related to social pathologies (e.g. functioning of prisons, prostitution, and drug dealing) also increase the GDP. It was accurately expressed already in 1968 by Robert Kennedy, who concluded the discussion on this issue saying that: the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile [The Guardian, 2012]. While Grzegorz W. Kołodko even states that it should be surprising how it is possible that despite a number of alternative measures of social and economic progress, we are still in the corset of narrow measure of the gross product, which completely omits many significant aspects of the social process of reproduction [Kołodko, 2013, p. 44]. In this context he points to the necessity of triple sustainable growth – economic, social, and ecological [Kołodko, 2013, p. 377]. Transition from the industrial civilisation model to the new model of economy, to the age of information, causes a kind of cultural regression, a phenomenon of cultural anchoring in the old system. This type of lock-in effect - described in the source literature, that is the effect of locking in the existing frames and systemic solutions, is a barrier to development. The practice more and more often and clearer demonstrates that in the conditions of the new economy, the tools and traditional solutions turn out to be not only ineffective, but they even increase the risk of wrong social and economic decisions, made at different institutional levels. All this proves that new development models must be searched for and implemented, to allow counteraction to dysfunctions of the contemporary economy and wasting the development potential, resulting from a variety of maladjustments generated by the crisis of civilisation. Polish authors who devote much of their work to these issues include G.W. Kołodko, Jerzy Kleer, or Maciej Bałtowski. Studies confirm that there is a need for a new pragmatism, new, proinclusive model of shaping the social and economic reality, a model which is more socially rooted, aiming at reconciling social, economic and ecological objectives, with simultaneous optimisation of the use of the social and economic potential [Kołodko, 2013; Bałtowski, 2016; Kleer, 2015]. There is more and more evidence that the barriers to economic development growing in the global economy are closely related with the rooting of the economy in social relations. The book of A. Blikle becomes a part of this trend in a new and original manner. Although the author concentrates on the analyses of social relations mainly at the level of an enterprise, at the same time, he comments them at a macroeconomic, sociological and ethical level, and interdisciplinary contexts constitute an original value of the book. Conclusion I treat the book of Andrzej Blike as an important voice in favour of shaping an inclusive social and economic system, in favour of shaping inclusive enterprises, that is oriented on an optimal absorption of knowledge, innovation and effective reconciliation of the interests of entrepreneurs with the interests of employees and the interests of society. Inclusiveness is indeed a value in itself. It is understood as a mechanism/system limiting wasting of material resources and human capital, and counteracting environmental degradation. An inclusive social and economic system is a system oriented on optimisation of the production resources and reducing the span between the actual and potential level of economic growth and social development [Reforma, 2015]. And this is the system addressed by Andrzej Blikle in his book. At least this is how I see it. Although the book is mainly concerned with business management, its message has a much wider dimension and is concerned with real measures of wealth, money and people’s lives. null

IntroductionDermatophytes are a group of molds characterized by the ability to produce keratinases, thereby carving out for themselves specific ecological niches. Their traditional division into three genera, Trichophyton, Microsporum, and Epidermophyton has been expanded to nine and the species in each genus were modified. Dermatophytes are among the most prevalent causes of human and animal mycoses. Their epidemiology is influenced by various factors. These factors may be evolutive such as the predilected environment of the fungus, namely, humans (anthropophilic), animals (zoophilic), or environment (geophilic), is evolutionary and thus may require centuries to develop. Many other factors, however, result from a variety of causes, affecting the epidemiology of dermatophytoses within a shorter time frame.ObjectiveThis review aims at summarizing the factors that have modified the epidemiology of dermatophytoses during the last decades.ResultsGeographic and climatic conditions, demography such as age and gender, migration, socio-economic conditions, lifestyle, and the environment have had an impact on changes in the epidemiology of dermatophytoses, as have changes in the pattern of human interaction with animals, including pets, farm, and wild animals. A typical example of such changes is the increased prevalence of Trichophyton tonsurans, which spread from Latin America to the United States and subsequently becoming a frequent etiological agent of tinea capitis in Africa, Middle East, and other areas.ConclusionThe comprehension of the epidemiology of dermatophytoses has a major bearing on their prevention and treatment. Since it is undergoing continuous changes, periodic assessments of the most recent developments of this topic are required. This article aims at providing such an overview.

Patients with rare diseases often have limited or no options for approved treatments or participation in clinical trials. In such cases, expanded access (or “compassionate use”) provides a potential means of accessing unapproved investigational medicines. It is also possible to capture and analyze clinical data from such use, but doing so is controversial. In this perspective, we offer examples of evidence derived from expanded access programs for rare diseases to illustrate its potential value to the decision-making of regulators and payers in the European Union and the United States. We discuss ethical and regulatory aspects to the use of expanded access data, with a focus on rare disease medicines. The heterogeneous approach to expanded access among countries within the European Union leaves uncertainties to what extent data can be collected and analyzed. We recommend the issuance of new guidance on data collection during expanded access, harmonization of European pathways, and an update of existing European compassionate use guidance. We hereby aim to clarify the supportive role of expanded access in evidence generation. Harmonization across Europe of expanded access regulations could reduce manufacturer burdens, improve patient access, and yield better data. These changes would better balance the need to generate quality evidence with the desire for pre-approval access to investigational medicine.

Photo by Adhy Savala on Unsplash ABSTRACT During a crisis, when healthcare capacity becomes overwhelmed and cannot meet regular standards of patient care, crisis standards of care are invoked to distribute scarce hospital space, staff, and supplies. When transitioning between conventional standards of care and crisis standards, hospitals may have to manage resources under scarcity constraints in an intermediate phase defined as the contingency phase. While much attention has been paid to the ethics of crisis standard of care protocols, contingency measures were more widely implemented, though little exists within the literature on the ethics of contingency measures or a clearly explicated contingency standard of care. This paper addresses three ethical issues with the current contingency response to COVID-19: the lack of formalization, the risks of using short-term solutions for prolonged contingency shortages, and the danger of exacerbating health disparities through hospital-level resource allocation. To mitigate these ethical issues, I offer recommendations for reimagining resource allocation during contingency standards of care. INTRODUCTION When transitioning between conventional standards of care and crisis standards, or in situations where shortages do not immediately threaten care delivery, hospitals may have to manage scarce resources in an intermediate phase, known as the “contingency” phase.[1] While much attention has been paid to the ethics of crisis standards, less literature covers the ethics of contingency measures or a clearly explicated contingency standard of care. Many states and hospital systems do not have contingency standards of care to dictate allocation absent an event triggering crisis standards. Crisis standards of care, used when healthcare capacity becomes overwhelmed and cannot meet regular standards of patient care, reflect ethical priorities relevant in times of shortage or other emergencies. These priorities include saving the most lives, the stewardship of scarce resources, and justice relating to equitable resource distribution.[2] Crisis standards of care delineate specialized allocation protocols and triage decision-making bodies at the institutional or state levels. Crisis standards of care require formal activation at the state level, and in the absence of clear triggers or governmental willingness to use them, hospitals may adopt informal strategies to manage allocation in the form of contingency measures. The contingency phase is defined by two simultaneous goals: prevent or stall crisis-level scarcity by managing limited resources and providing patient care that is functionally equivalent to usual care.[3] In other words, allocate scarce resources with no significant health consequences to patients. However, this is an unrealistic expectation: meeting a patient’s medical needs and allocating resources on the basis of scarcity instead of medical indications can be at odds, creating ethical tension. This paper addresses three ethical issues with the current contingency response stemming from this tension: the lack of formalization, the risk of using short-term solutions for prolonged contingency shortages, and the danger of exacerbating health disparities through hospital-level resource allocation. To mitigate these ethical issues, I offer recommendations for reimagining resource allocation during contingency standards of care. l. Lack of Formalization One shortcoming of current contingency measures is that they fail to meet the same level of procedural detail and clarity as crisis standards. The early COVID-19 surges in Italy and France demonstrated the pitfalls of bedside allocation in the absence of procedural guidance. The acute scarcity of critical care resources forced doctors in these countries to make allocation decisions at the bedside, which often resulted in de facto age-based allocation as well as experiences of moral distress and shame among providers.[4] In France, medical allocation guidelines and statistics were never released to the public, raising concerns over the role of transparency in implementing crisis standards and triage guidelines and causing the public to question the trustworthiness of provider triage.[5] Though many states in the US have crisis standards of care that can be implemented in the case of a large-scale triage event, these measures vary widely. A 2020 review of 31 crisis standards of care in the US found that only 18 contained strong “ethical grounding,” 28 used “evidence-based clinical processes and operations,” 21 included “ongoing community and provider engagement, education, and communication,” and 16 had “clear indicators, triggers, and lines of responsibility.”[6] The need for standardization, public transparency, and guidelines for crisis standards of care to prevent bedside allocation has been widely recognized. However, these issues remain unresolved by public policy or legislative efforts during the contingency period before (or after) crisis standards apply. A recent public health study that observed triage team members in a high-fidelity triage simulation highlighted the challenges of making equitable frontline allocation decisions.[7] In the simulation, participants nudged patient priority status up or down depending on what they subjectively identified as morally relevant factors. Through the simulation, participants reported difficulty separating implicit biases about patient characteristics from their clinical judgment. In the absence of formal institutional or regional guidelines for allocation during contingency-level shortages, there are few to no procedural safeguards against biased, ad hoc, and non-transparent rationing. Without formalized or standardized contingency allocation guidance, providers are left to make bedside allocation decisions that are susceptible to individual biases and patterns of unintended discrimination. An example of this susceptibility is seen when hospitals allow patients who no longer benefit from ICU resources to continue occupying ICU beds. This is based on a first-come-first-served (FCFS) approach to bed allocation. FCFS is often a default for patient intake, which led to disparities in care access during the early COVID-19 pandemic. Media reports of hospitals with “plenty of space” being unwilling to accept patients from overwhelmed, lower-income hospitals illustrate that the FCFS default advantages those who could show up first to a particular hospital: often privileged, well-funded healthcare systems that were inaccessible to low-income communities.[8] FCFS is blind to several morally relevant factors, including the likelihood of survival to discharge, reciprocity (i.e. prioritizing healthcare workers), and varying degrees of access to healthcare. Therefore, it inappropriately privileges those in proximity to healthcare systems or with social connections enabling greater initial access to care.[9] During crisis standards of care, excessive mortality that would result from FCFS is mitigated through formalized system-wide triage protocols based on current patient health status and potential benefit from resources. Crisis and contingency standards may provide liability coverage for providers who reallocate critical care beds away from those who no longer benefit during periods of scarcity. This liability coverage shifts bed allocation away from an FCFS model, but only if the policy is well-defined, clearly established, and known to providers. Without a formal system to guide the process or transition from the usual method of allocation to the contingency period, contingency decisions about who gets a scarce resource may continue to operate on an implicit FCFS basis, even when approaching crisis levels of scarcity. Additionally, these decisions will fall unsustainably on individual providers or transfer center workers, leading to moral distress on the frontlines when hospitals are already strained. Lessons from the crisis and contingency responses during COVID-19 can improve future contingency responses. There are multiple ways of achieving equity during contingency allocation, ranging from hospital-level to state-level policy changes. State-wide policies and interventions to facilitate resource-sharing can relieve some of the scarcity burdens that hospitals may face during the contingency period. For example, moving ICU patients to lower levels of care once they have sufficiently recovered is a challenge for doctors, who often call other hospitals to find open beds. In these situations, providers who do not move patients who no longer benefit from ICU beds unknowingly reinforce the FCFS system in which those who arrive first keep the scarce beds, while those who arrive later or wait for one are disadvantaged by having limited access to them. State-wide patient transfer centers, often facilitated by state public health departments, present an alternative by balancing patient needs and bed distribution more equitably and efficiently than individual physicians do, as demonstrated following COVID-19 surges in hospitalization.[10] These centers aid not only in allocating open tertiary care beds, but also in identifying open beds at lower levels of care and assisting physicians with transferring out patients who can be safely downgraded and no longer benefit from tertiary care resources. However, the simplest solution is to encourage the creation of ethics guidance or protocols for contingency allocation at the hospital level. In hospitals, institutional ethics guidance can help providers navigate difficult decisions and conversations with patients. When providers face time-sensitive allocation decisions, like the allocation of open ICU beds, the guidance would be a useful tool for making transparent, principled, and ethically justified allocation decisions in real-time to mitigate the risk of ad hoc or implicit rationing. ll. Unsuited for Prolonged Resource Shortages Secondly, neither contingency nor crisis standards are currently designed to respond to prolonged strains on the healthcare system. Since the start of the pandemic, a prolonged period of staffing shortages began and is projected to persist.[11] However, both crisis and contingency standards assume that the system will eventually return to conventional standards of care. For example, as a contingency or crisis standard, many hospitals deferred elective surgeries to preserve limited resources for emergency and life-saving procedures. Massachusetts, for instance, issued a public health emergency order that required hospitals to defer 50 percent of all non-essential and non-urgent (elective) surgeries. This order demonstrates the use of this contingency measure in response to prolonged staffing and bed shortages.[12] However, the deferral of elective procedures can result in adverse long-term community health consequences. Medical conditions typically addressed through elective surgery, such as joint replacement surgeries for osteoarthritis patients, may worsen if delayed. This can result in greater numbers of acute emergencies, the need for more complex surgical procedures later, increased reliance on pain medications, and longer recovery times.[13] Without a greater understanding of long-term complications in community health, existing contingency strategies, such as the deferral of elective surgeries, may be unsuitable for prolonged shortages. This becomes a greater threat to patient safety when contingency measures inappropriately take the place of crisis standards, risking the long-term implementation of emergency measures designed for temporary use. Although some state emergency planning documents identify indicators and triggers for activating contingency and crisis operations,[14] this transition is not always clear in action. For example, New York did not implement crisis standards of care during the early COVID-19 pandemic despite being one of the hardest-hit cities in the US.[15] Other states, including California, Texas, and Florida, did not activate crisis standards of care, leaving hospitals to implement informal contingency measures that ultimately required allocation strategies very similar or identical to many crisis standards of care protocols.[16] Due to the hesitance to activate crisis standards, ad hoc contingency measures and bedside decision-making prevailed over formal triage protocols. If contingency measures are not set forth in objective documents and are inappropriately used in the place of crisis standards, these short-term measures may result in an unfair or non-transparent distribution of scarce resources. When shortages in space, staff, or supplies jeopardize the ability to provide necessary care for critically ill patients under a conventional standard of care, failures to activate crisis standards risk the inappropriate use of ad hoc contingency measures in their place. With clear contingency standards of care, the duration of an ad hoc approach could be limited. Crisis standards are defined and activated at the regional or state-wide level, but outside of hospital-specific resource limitations, there are generally no standardized indications or triggers for transitioning into and out of contingency measures. Leaving contingency needs to individual hospitals may seem beneficial but defining the contingency period at the hospital level and the crisis period at the state or regional level blurs the line about when it is appropriate for decision makers to activate crisis standards, risking delayed activation or failure to activate them at all. Therefore, it is important that state policies implement automatic triggers for activation that clearly delineate between contingency and crisis responses.[17] Automatic triggers based on validated metrics like remaining available resources can inform the appropriate decision makers about when they must activate crisis standards. These triggers should be transparent to the public, validated, and updated over time with evolving data. These automatic triggers would prevent confusion, inconsistent guidelines, and inequitable contingency allocation at the hands of distressed providers when crisis standards are needed. Defining when to begin crisis standards could help limit the length of the contingency period. This would protect against the inappropriate application of contingency measures to crisis-level scarcity and prolonged shortages that they could not sustainably ameliorate. lll. Potential to Exacerbate Health Disparities Inconsistencies in contingency allocation open the door to disparities in care and unequal distribution of scarcity burdens among different communities based on their location or health needs. This is a concern because it is unclear whether contingency measures can meet their goal of achieving functionally equivalent patient outcomes when resource allocation must be balanced with patient-centered care.[18] The care under contingency standards is meant to be functionally equivalent to regular care. The definition assumes (or may wrongly suggest) that any contingency strategy in place to avoid critical scarcity has no significant impact on patient outcomes. While functional equivalence is attainable, there is currently little research into which contingency measures achieve functionally equivalent outcomes and which patient groups may be disproportionately affected by harmful resource allocation strategies. Although the transition from contingency standards to crisis standards is defined by the inability to provide functionally equivalent care, the difference in practice may merely be a distinction between visible, immediate sacrifices to patient well-being during crises and less-obvious, long-term decrements in community health due to protracted contingency care alterations. Two common contingency measures are cause for concern over disparate patient outcomes and the attainability of functional equivalence. First, restricting emergency room visits by the patient’s degree of need has worrying consequences. In late 2021 and early 2022, hospitals in Massachusetts faced widespread staffing shortages, leading to an emergency order that restricted emergency visits to emergency needs.[19] While this order is a reasonable method of allocating limited staff in the emergency department during severe shortages, it is doubtful that the outcomes of this restriction were equivalent to usual care. Health issues that are soon-to-be emergencies are filtered out until they worsen, resulting in patients overflowing to urgent care clinics or presenting to ERs with more severe forms of sicknesses later on. Given the empirical evidence demonstrating ER treatment and admission disparities that disadvantage Black and Hispanic patients, such a measure would only exacerbate these disparities by further limiting access to needed care.[20] Second, altered staffing ratios, which stretch a limited number of providers to meet patient needs during a staffing shortage, are another concerning yet common contingency measure. Staffing allocation is often viewed similarly to the allocation of space and medical equipment, such that contingency alterations to staffing operations may not seem like they significantly jeopardize patient care quality and outwardly appear functionally equivalent.[21] However, lower ratios of qualified nurses are associated with poor outcomes such as higher inpatient mortality[22] and lower survival rates of in-hospital cardiac arrest for Black patients.[23] These examples highlight the strong potential for contingency measures to amplify social health disparities, particularly when adopted over a prolonged time frame. Lowered standards of care in crisis allocation disproportionately impact racial and ethnic minorities.[24] For example, crisis standards of care used clinical scoring systems that were not developed or validated for crisis triage to prioritize access to life-saving treatments during the COVID-19 pandemic. This practice actively gives rise to racial health disparities and discrimination against disabled patients.[25] Not only were the standards inequitable in practice, but they varied widely from state to state and sometimes even from hospital to hospital, creating disparities across and within geographic regions.[26] If contingency measures are similarly implemented across hospitals or hospital departments without standardization or advance planning to ensure equitable outcomes, it is likely that the burden of a lower standard of care will fall primarily on disadvantaged patient groups and racial minorities. However, standardization alone may be insufficient. Other factors like varying levels of details on patients’ charts between hospitals could produce unfair outcomes if used to determine patient admission or transfer priority, even if the criteria for admissions and transfers are consistent. Thus, ongoing monitoring for unintended patterns of disparity must accompany standardization to ensure that blind spots in the allocation process are identified and corrected. Bioethics has long been preoccupied with the micro-allocation of limited resources within hospitals instead of confronting the structural inequities that underlie broader scarcity and patient needs. The traditional dilemma of allocating limited hospital resources among a certain number of patients overlooks questions about how other resources have already been allocated, which patients were present at the hospital in the first place, where hospitals have (and have not) been built, and whether previous allocation strategies created bias in the broader distribution of resources. Therefore, to achieve fairness, bioethicists must pay attention to aspects of the broader distribution of resources, such as social determinants of health and the allocation of preventative resources at the public health level. One strategy for measuring and addressing these disparities is the Area Deprivation Index (ADI). The ADI quantifies the effects of race, class, and socioeconomic background by geographic region for use in public health research and the prioritization of resources.[27] It has shown promise in identifying geographic regions in need of targeted community health efforts for diabetes management based on electronic patient health records.[28] The ADI and similar tools would be useful in proactively deciding how to allocate public health resources when hospitals are strained. Moreover, through using population health and resource data, public health organizations may forecast contingency shortages allowing for the adoption of early measures to mitigate health disparities that might otherwise be amplified from hospital-level contingency allocation decisions. CONCLUSION Meeting community health needs during periods of contingency scarcity, both before and after crisis standards of care apply, will require contingency standards of care rather than a bedside ad hoc distribution of scarce resources. While it is not inherently ethically unjustifiable for hospitals to adopt measures that may lower the standard of care during contingency standards, the necessity of these measures requires that bioethicists consider how equity, transparency, and the overall aim of functional equivalence can best be achieved under conditions of scarcity. The long-term health consequences of existing contingency measures, the potential for ad hoc and inconsistent allocation of scarce resources, and the need for consensus about when it becomes appropriate to make the formal transition to crisis standards of care demand further consideration. Because contingency measures will likely amplify existing disparities as crisis standards have, hospital-level management of scarcity is inadequate. Public health measures should be adopted in parallel to anticipate and manage health needs at the community or state level when resources are strained. - [1] Altevogt, B. M., Stroud, C., Hanson, S. L., Hanfling, D., & Gostin, L. O. (2009). Guidance for Establishing Crisis Standards of Care for Use in Disaster Situations: A Letter Report. The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/12749 [2] Emanuel, E. J., Persad, G., Upshur, R., Thome, B., Parker, M., Glickman, A., Zhang, C., Boyle, C., Smith, M., & Phillips, J. P. (2020). Fair Allocation of Scarce Medical Resources in the Time of Covid-19. New England Journal of Medicine, 382(21), 2049–2055. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMsb2005114 [3] Alfandre, D., Sharpe, V. A., Geppert, C., Foglia, M. B., Berkowitz, K., Chanko, B., & Schonfeld, T. (2021). Between Usual and Crisis Phases of a Public Health Emergency: The Mediating Role of Contingency Measures. The American Journal of Bioethics, 21(8), 4–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2021.1925778 [4] Rosenbaum, L. (2020). Facing Covid-19 in Italy—Ethics, Logistics, and Therapeutics on the Epidemic’s Front Line. New England Journal of Medicine, 382(20), 1873–1875. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMp2005492 [5] Orfali, K. (2020). What Triage Issues Reveal: Ethics in the COVID-19 Pandemic in Italy and France. Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 17(4), 675–679. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673-020-10059-y [6] Romney, D., Fox, H., Carlson, S., Bachmann, D., O’Mathuna, D., & Kman, N. (2020). Allocation of Scarce Resources in a Pandemic: A Systematic Review of US State Crisis Standards of Care Documents. Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, 14(5), 677–683. https://doi.org/10.1017/dmp.2020.101 [7] Butler, C. R., Webster, L. B., Diekema, D. S., Gray, M. M., Sakata, V. L., Tonelli, M. R., & Vranas, K. C. (2022). Perspectives of Triage Team Members Participating in Statewide Triage Simulations for Scarce Resource Allocation During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Washington State. JAMA Network Open, 5(4), e227639. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.7639 [8] Dwyer, J. (2020, May 14). One Hospital Was Besieged by the Virus. Nearby Was ‘Plenty of Space.’—The New York Times. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/nyregion/coronavirus-ny-hospitals.html [9] Persad, G., Wertheimer, A., & Emanuel, E. J. (2009). Principles for allocation of scarce medical interventions. Lancet (London, England), 373(9661), 423–431. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(09)60137-9 [10] Mitchell, S. H., Rigler, J., & Baum, K. (2022). Regional Transfer Coordination and Hospital Load Balancing During COVID-19 Surges. JAMA Health Forum, 3(2), e215048. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamahealthforum.2021.5048 [11] ASPE. (2022, May 3). Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Hospital and Outpatient Clinician Workforce: Challenges and Policy Responses. ASPE. https://aspe.hhs.gov/reports/covid-19-health-care-workforce [12] Executive Office of Health and Human Services. (2021). Baker-Polito Administration Provides COVID-19 Update on Mask Advisory, Hospital Support | Mass.gov. https://www.mass.gov/news/baker-polito-administration-provides-covid-19-update-on-mask-advisory-hospital-support [13] The Lancet Rheumatology. (2021). Too long to wait: The impact of COVID-19 on elective surgery. The Lancet Rheumatology, 3(2), e83. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2665-9913(21)00001-1 [14] For an example of transition planning between crisis and contingency standards, see Minnesota Department of Health. (2021). Ethical Framework for Transitions Between Conventional, Contingency, and Crisis Conditions in Pervasive or Catastrophic Public Health Events with Medical Surge Implications (Minnesota Crisis Standards of Care). https://www.health.state.mn.us/communities/ep/surge/crisis/framework_transitions.pdf [15] Powell, T., & Chuang, E. (2020). COVID in NYC: What We Could Do Better. The American Journal of Bioethics, 20(7), 62–66. https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2020.1764146 [16] Persoff, J., & Wynia, M. K. (2021). Ethically Navigating the Murky Waters of “Contingency Standards of Care.” The American Journal of Bioethics, 21(8), 20–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2021.1939810 [17] Board on Health Sciences Policy & Institute of Medicine. (2013). Indicators and Triggers. In Crisis Standards of Care: A Toolkit for Indicators and Triggers. National Academies Press (US). http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK202381/ [18] Frith, L., Draper, H., Fovargue, S., Baines, P., Redhead, C., & Chiumento, A. (2021). Neither ‘Crisis Light’ nor ‘Business as Usual’: Considering the Distinctive Ethical Issues Raised by the Contingency and Reset Phases of a Pandemic. The American Journal of Bioethics, 21(8), 34–37. https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2021.1940363 [19] Rosseau, M. (2022, January 14). New emergency orders issued to help understaffed Mass. Hospitals. Boston.Com. https://www.boston.com/news/coronavirus/2022/01/14/new-emergency-orders-issued-to-help-understaffed-mass-hospitals/ [20] Zhang, X., Carabello, M., Hill, T., Bell, S. A., Stephenson, R., & Mahajan, P. (2020). Trends of Racial/Ethnic Differences in Emergency Department Care Outcomes Among Adults in the United States From 2005 to 2016. Frontiers in Medicine, 7. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmed.2020.00300 [21] Hick, J. L., Hanfling, D., & Wynia, M. (2022). Hospital Planning for Contingency and Crisis Conditions: Crisis Standards of Care Lessons from COVID-19. The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcjq.2022.02.003 [22] Musy, S. N., Endrich, O., Leichtle, A. B., Griffiths, P., Nakas, C. T., & Simon, M. (2021). The association between nurse staffing and inpatient mortality: A shift-level retrospective longitudinal study. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 120, 103950. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2021.103950 [23] Brooks Carthon, M., Brom, H., McHugh, M., Sloane, D. M., Berg, R., Merchant, R., Girotra, S., & Aiken, L. H. (2021). Better Nurse Staffing Is Associated With Survival for Black Patients and Diminishes Racial Disparities in Survival After In-Hospital Cardiac Arrests. Medical Care, 59(2), 169–176. https://doi.org/10.1097/MLR.0000000000001464 [24] Annas, G. J., & Crosby, S. S. (2021). Standard Racism: Trying to Use “Crisis Standards of Care” in the COVID-19 Pandemic. The American Journal of Bioethics, 21(8), 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2021.1941424 [25] Wynia, M. K., & Sottile, P. D. (2020). Ethical Triage Demands a Better Triage Survivability Score. The American Journal of Bioethics, 20(7), 75–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2020.1779412 [26] Fink, S. (2020). Ethical Dilemmas in Covid-19 Medical Care: Is a Problematic Triage Protocol Better or Worse than No Protocol at All? The American Journal of Bioethics, 20(7), 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2020.1788663 [27] Knighton, A. J., Savitz, L., Belnap, T., Stephenson, B., & VanDerslice, J. (2016). Introduction of an Area Deprivation Index Measuring Patient Socioeconomic Status in an Integrated Health System: Implications for Population Health. EGEMS (Washington, DC), 4(3), 1238. https://doi.org/10.13063/2327-9214.1238 [28] Kurani, S. S., Lampman, M. A., Funni, S. A., Giblon, R. E., Inselman, J. W., Shah, N. D., Allen, S., Rushlow, D., & McCoy, R. G. (2021). Association Between Area-Level Socioeconomic Deprivation and Diabetes Care Quality in US Primary Care Practices. JAMA Network Open, 4(12), e2138438. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.38438

Was it seven or eight summers ago, when the sun first became our enemy and set our skin on fire? We find it now in the normality of strange weather and the telescoping of the seasons; wherein it’s 27 degrees and there are no leaves yet on the trees, a hot August day in April. We watch the media spectacles of monster storms and mud slides that arrive with increasing force and frequency. And we despair over the death of the Polar bears, starving because the Arctic sea-ice upon which they catch seals can no longer bear their weight. Up there, we hear, the permafrost is melting, and the Inuit of Baffin Island are witnessing thunder and lightning for the first time in their lives. Down here, along the southern border of Canada, we are just beginning to feel the fear in our guts. The ambivalence and discomfort which we may feel about these changes – whose effects are as intimate as they are remote – speak to a more subtle perception that everything has now come undone: realigned and re-made by forces beyond our control, and yet, of our own making. That significant futurity which was once the sine qua non of a rational modernity – the self-confident assurance that things can only get better and never worse – has fallen to the wayside of our collective memory, useful now only for the purposes of Hallmark greeting cards. As usual, we suffer from a failure of imagination, wherein the only facts worth knowing become unspeakable, verboten vulgarities never to be uttered out-loud in polite company. What accounts for this silence? While we may increasingly feel that something is amiss in the world, this experience is not authorised or legitimated by the propositions of commercial media or conventional thought. What are the social consequences of this gap between the corporeal experience of global warming and its public representation? Can such affectual experience be mined as a means to advocate social change? In Canadian and American commercial media, discussion of “global warming” is still largely absent (Ungar; Weingart, Engels and Pansegrau). When the hurricanes Katrina and Rita whirled into Level 5 status across the very hot waters of the Gulf of Mexico this Fall, mention of global warming was quickly flicked away as a minor irritant. Such omissions are not surprising, given the political economy of American media. The automobile industry spends US$3 billion out of a total of US$9 billion annual expenditures of all advertising on network television. Not one of these ads is for hybrid cars. It is also our idea of nature that allows us to relegate matters of the environment to the periphery of our concerns. In its more piously Wordsworthian vestiges, nature is deemed as self-evident and unaltered by the ravages of time. It’s this temporal stasis attributed to nature that allows us to absolve ourselves from its fate. Nature, after all, is the non-human. And while the argument that only humans make history – that only humans transform and innovate themselves and their environment and manipulate the dimensions of time – can be recognised as a neat piece of social construction built in the interests of human conquest, we are still reticent to acknowledge nature on its own terms. Val Plumwood has argued that, “if the category of ‘nature’ is seen as phony, if it can only appear when suitably surrounded by scare quotes, [then] we are less likely to be inspired by appeals to nature’s integrity in [it’s defence]” (3). Somehow, believing in nature slides into an unseemly essentialism or a fetishistic form of love. Perhaps it’s not surprising then that so many people do not feel compelled to come to nature’s defense. Survey research from the United States, published in 2000 and 2003, shows that while 90% of Americans have now heard of global warming and believe it’s an important issue, a much smaller percentage are actually concerned about it (Stamm, Clark and Eblacas; Leiserowitz). Other matters such as employment, the economy and the rising costs of housing take priority over environmental issues. Furthermore, the research finds that while espousing environmental values, only a small percentage of respondents would self-identify as “environmentalist”. While being pro-environment is perceived as “having good character”, having too much of this good character is a bad thing. Still, can’t they feel what’s going on? Certainly here on the coast of British Columbia, where rainforests still run along the ocean’s edge, something has changed. Nothing is quite as ‘temperate’ as it once was. The weather shifts unexpectedly and dramatically, and the summers have become too hot and too dry. Global warming has brought a new atmosphere to the forests, as if under all this unfamiliar dryness and dust a latent extinction is beginning to stir. This current prospect – the death of not just a million species of plant and animal life (Kirby), but of countless human lives – may be redirecting our attention now to the interdependent relation, the fluid interchanges, between human and non-human worlds. This deadly probability may engender a new vitality, new ways of feeling life. “Nature”, as Michel Serres puts it, “is reminding us of its existence” (29). The challenge posed by this recognition prohibits the perception of nature in static terms, as a commodity or as handy oubliette for societal debris. In so doing, feeling the life of nature allows consideration of the ways in which nature and human culture have long been wedded to one another, not just in terms of the semiotic operations of a binarism, but as a complex and reciprocal project of interdependent life. Recognition of the interdependence of human and non-human life may also entail a particular affectual sensibility – a means of feeling life as it resonates against our skin and fills our senses. In this moment, “everything that is, resounds”. Here, “the sense and recognisability of things … do not lie in conceptual categories in which we mentally place them, but in their positions and orientations which our postures address” (Lingus 59). It’s not a question then of what nature means to us, but does nature do with us? How does it make us feel? Emotion has remained discursively submerged in discussions of climate change, not only because the stakes are such that only the scientists, with their particular authority and legitimacy, are afforded a voice, but also because it threatens the legitimacy of a formal rationalist representation of nature which excludes the non-human from the purview of ethical consideration. An affectual relationship to the natural world does have its difficulties. “Feeling nature” is based upon some sort of understanding with it, a form of competency, of ‘knowing your way around’. Such knowledges are often bound by class: the privileged remit of the romantic individual in search of an authentic experience, or the uncomfortable locale of hard and often violent labour. Still, it is in feeling the shrinking of life into the shadows of an uncommon heat that we may use this sentience to good effect. In his book The Natural Contract, Michel Serres argues that, “through exclusively social contracts, we have abandoned the bond that connects us to the world. … What language do the things of the world speak that we might come to an understanding of them contractually? … In fact, the Earth speaks to us in terms of forces, bonds and interactions … each of the partners in symbiosis thus owes … life to the other, on pain of death” (39). Long ago, when we were young, many of us made good money working in the coastal forest of British Columbia – either cutting it or milling it or planting it. I was alone there once for 6 weeks and was haunted daily by a raven who would track my movements through the trees, muttering incantations and clicks. By the time I walked out of the woods I was nearly speechless and it took me weeks to recover the easy cultural behaviour that came so naturally before. A friend of mine once had the job of getting rid of the young poplar and alder trees that colonise the logging slash. His task was to “cut and squirt”: to slash the trees with a machete and squirt poison inside the cut. Maybe it was a bad case of anthropomorphism, or maybe it was the drugs, but to this day, he swears he could hear the trees scream. References Kirby, Alex. “Climate Risk to Million Species.” BBC News Online, U.K. Edition, 7 Jan. 2004. Leiserowitz, A. American Opinions on Global Warming: Project Results. Eugene: U of Oregon, 2003. Lingus, Alphonso. The Imperitive. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998. Plumwood, Val. “Nature as Agency and the Prospects for a Progressive Naturalism.” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 4 (2001): 3-32. Serres, Michel. The Natural Contract. (Trans. E. MacArthur and W. Paulson), Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 1995. Stamm, K.R., F. Clark and P.R. Eblacas. “Mass Communication and Public Understanding of Environmental Problems: The Case of Global Warming.” Public Understanding of Science 9 (2000): 219-37. Ungar, S. “Is Strange Weather in the Air?: A Study of U.S. National News Coverage of Extreme Weather Events.” Climatic Change 41 (1999): 133-50. Weingart, P.A., A. Engels and P. Pansegrau. “Risks of Communication: Discourses on Climate Change in Science, Politics and the Mass Media.” Public Understanding of Science 9 (2000): 261-83. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Seaton, Beth. "Feeling the Heat." M/C Journal 8.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/08-seaton.php>. APA Style Seaton, B. (Dec. 2005) "Feeling the Heat," M/C Journal, 8(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/08-seaton.php>.

This article analyses the public persona of Jeremy Gilley, a documentary filmmaker, peace campaigner, and the founder of the organisation Peace One Day (POD). It begins by outlining how Gilley’s persona is presented in a manner which resonates with established archetypes of social campaigners, and how this creates POD’s legitimacy among grassroots organisations. I then describe a distinct, but not inconsistent, facet of Gilley’s persona which speaks specifically to entrepreneurs. The article outlines how Gilley’s individuality works to simultaneously address these overlapping audiences and argues that his persona can be read as an articulation of social entrepreneurship. Gilley represents an example of a public personality working to “crystallise issues and to normativise debates” (Marshall “Personifying” 370) concerning corporate involvement with non-profit organisations and the marketisation of the non-profit sector. Peace One Day (POD) is a UK-based non-profit organisation established in 1999 by actor-turned-documentary-filmmaker Jeremy Gilley. In the 1990s, while filming a documentary about global conflict, Gilley realised there was no internationally recognised day of ceasefire and non-violence. He created POD to found such a day and began lobbying the United Nations. In 2001, the 111th plenary meeting of the General Assembly passed a resolution which marked 21 September as the annual International Day of Peace (United Nations). Since 2001, POD has worked to create global awareness of Peace Day. By 2006, other NGOs began using the day to negotiate 24-hour ceasefires in various conflict zones, allowing them to carry out work in areas normally too dangerous to enter. For example, in 2007, the inoculation of 1.3 million Afghan children against polio was possible due to an agreement from the Taliban to allow safe passage to agencies working in the country during the day. This was repeated in subsequent years and, by 2009, 4.5 million children had been immunised (POD Part Three). While neither POD nor Gilley played a direct part in the polio vaccination programmes or specific ceasefires, his organisation acted as a catalyst for such endeavours and these initiatives would not have occurred without POD’s efforts.Gilley is not only the founder of POD, he is also the majority shareholder, key decision-maker, and predominant public spokesperson in this private, non-charitable, non-profit organisation (Frances 73). While POD’s celebrity supporters participate in press conferences, it is Gilley who does most to raise awareness. His public persona is inextricably linked with POD and is created through a range of presentational media with which he is engaged. These include social media content, regular blogposts on POD’s website, as well as appearances at a series of speaking events. Most significantly, Gilley establishes his public persona through a number of documentary films (Peace One Day; Day After; POD Part Three), which are shot largely from his perspective and narrated by his voiceover, and which depict POD’s key struggles and successes.The Peace Campaigner as an Activist and Entrepreneur In common with other non-profit organisations, POD relies on celebrities from the entertainment industries. It works with them in two key ways: raising the public profile of the organisation, and shaping the public persona of its founder by inviting comparisons of their perceived exceptionalness with his ostensible ordinariness. For example, Gilley’s documentaries depict various press conferences held by POD over a number of years. Those organised prior to POD recruiting celebrity spokespeople were “completely ignored by the media” whereas those held after celebrity backing from Jude Law and Angelina Jolie had been secured attracted considerable interest (Day After). Gilley explains his early difficulties in publicising his message by suggesting that he “was a nobody” (POD Part Three). This representation as a “nobody” or, more diplomatically, as “ordinary,” is a central component of Gilley’s persona. “Ordinariness” here means situating Gilley outside the political and entertainment elites and aligning him with more everyday suburban settings. This is done through a combination of the aesthetic qualities of his public presentation and his publically narrated back-story.Aesthetically speaking, Gilley presents his ordinariness through his casual attire and long hair. His appearance is similar to the campaigners, youth groups and school children he addresses, suggesting he is a representative of that demographic but also distancing him from political elites. The diplomats Gilley meets, such as those at the UN, wear the appropriate attire for their elite political setting: suits. In one key scene in the documentary Peace One Day, Gilley makes his first trip to the UN to meet Kofi Annan, UN General Secretary at the time, and appears at their doors clean cut and suitably dressed. He declares that his new appearance was designed to aid his credibility with the UN. Yet, at the same time, he makes explicit that he borrowed the suit from a friend and the tie from his grandfather and, prior to the meeting, it was decided, “the pony tail had to go.” Thus Gilley seeks the approval of both political elites and the ordinary public, and constructs a persona that speaks to both, though he aligns himself with the latter.Gilley’s back-story permeates his films and works to present his ordinariness. For example, POD has humble beginnings as an almost grassroots, family-run organisation, and Gilley depicts a campaign run on a shoestring from his mother’s spare bedroom in an ordinary suburban home. Although British Airways provided free flights from the organisation’s outset, Gilley shows his friends volunteering their time by organising fundraising events. POD’s modest beginnings are reflected in its founder, who confides about both his lack of formal education and lack of success as an actor (Day After). This “ordinariness” is constructed in opposition to the exceptional qualities of POD’s A-list celebrity backers—such as Angelina Jolie, who does enjoy success as an actor. This contrast is emphasised by inviting Jolie into Gilley’s everyday domestic setting and highlighting the icons of success she brings with her. For example, at his first meeting with Jolie, Gilley waits patiently for her and remarks about the expensive car which eventually arrives outside his house, denoting Jolie’s arrival. He notes in the voiceover to his The Day after Peace documentary, “this was unbelievable, Angelina Jolie sat on my sofa asking me what she could do, I couldn’t stop talking. I was so nervous.”Gilley promotes his ordinariness by using aesthetics and personal narrative. Evidence of how he struggled to realise his goals and the financial burdens he carried (Peace One Day) suggest that there is something authentic about Gilley’s vision for Peace Day. This also helps Gilley to align his public persona with common understandings of the political activist as a prophetic social visionary. POD is able to tap into the idea of the power of the individual as a force for change with references to Martin Luther King and Gandhi. Although Gilley makes no direct comparison between himself and these figures, blog entries such as “ten years ago, I had an idea; I dared to dream that I could galvanise the countries of the world to recognise an official day of ceasefire and nonviolence. Mad? Ambitious? Idealistic? All of the above” (Gilley “Dream”), invite comparisons with King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. This is further augmented by references to Gilley as an outsider to political establishments, such as the UN, which he is sure have “become cynical about the opportunity” they have to unite the world (BBC Interview).Interestingly, Gilley’s presentation as a pragmatic “change-maker” whose “passion is contagious” (Ahmad Fawzi, in POD Concert) also aligns him with a second figure: the entrepreneur. Where Gilley’s performances at school and community groups present his persona as an activist, his entrepreneur persona is presented through his performances at a series of business seminars. These seminars, entitled “Unleash Your Power of Influence,” are targeted towards young entrepreneurs and business-people very much consistent with the “creative class” demographic (Florida). The speakers, including Gilley, have all been successful in business (POD is a private company) and they offer to their audiences motivational presentations, and business advice. Although a semi-regular occurrence, it is the first two events held in July 2010 (Unleash 1) and November 2010 (Unleash 2) that are discussed here. Held in a luxury five-star London hotel, the events demonstrate a starkly different aspect of POD than that presented to community groups and schools, and the amateur grassroots ethic presented in Gilley’s documentary films—for example, tickets for Unleash 2 started at £69 and offered ‘goody bags’ for £95 (author’s observation of the event)—yet consistencies remain.Aesthetically speaking, Gilley’s appearance signifies a connection with these innovative, stereotypically young, founders of start-up companies and where Gilley is an outsider to political organisations; they are outsiders to business establishments. Further, many of these companies typically started, like POD, in a spare bedroom. The speakers at the Unleash events provide insights into their background which frequently demonstrate a rise from humble beginnings to business success, in the face of adversity, and as a result of innovation and perseverance. Gilley is not out of place in this environment and the modest beginnings of POD are relayed to his audience in a manner which bears a striking similarity to his for-profit counterparts.An analysis of Gilley’s presentations at these events demonstrates clear links between the dual aspects of Gilley’s public persona, the political economy of POD, and the underlying philosophy of the organisation—social entrepreneurship. The next section sets out some of the principals of social entrepreneurship and how the aspects of Gilley’s persona, outlined above, reinforce these.Personifying Social EnterpriseGenerally speaking, the business literature greatly emphasises entrepreneurs as “resourceful, value-creating change agents” who are “never satisfied with the status quo [... and are] a forceful engine of growth in our economy” (Dees and Economy 3-4). More recently, the focus of discussion has included social entrepreneurs. These individuals work within “an organisation that attacks [social and environmental] problems through a business format, even if it is not legally structured as a profit-seeking entity” (Bornstein and Davis xv) and advocate commercially oriented non-profit organisations that establish “win-win” relationships between non-profits and business.This coming together of the for- and non-profit sectors has range of precedents, most notably in “philanthrocapitalism” (Bishop and Green) and the types of partnerships established between corporations and environmentalists, such as Greenpeace Australia (Beder). However, philanthrocapitalism often encompasses the application of business methods to social problems by those who have amassed fortunes in purely commercial ventures (such as Bill Gates), and Beder’s work describes established for- and non-profit institutions working together. While social entrepreneurship overlaps with these, social entrepreneurs seek to do well by doing good by making a profit while simultaneously realising social goals (Bornstein and Davis 25).Read as an articulation of the coming together of the activist and the entrepreneur, Gilley’s individuality encapsulates the social enterprise movement. His persona draws from the commonalities between the archetypes of the traditional grassroots activist and start-up entrepreneur, as pioneering visionary and outsider to the establishment. While his films establish his authenticity among politically attuned members of the public, his appearances at the Unleash events work to signify the legitimacy of his organisation to those who identify with social entrepreneurialism and take the position that business should play a positive role in social causes. As an activist, Gilley’s creates his persona through his aesthetic qualities and a performance that draws on historical precedents of social prophets. As an entrepreneur, Gilley draws on the same aesthetic qualities and, through his performance, mitigates the types of disjuncture evident in the 1980s between environmental activists, politicians and business leaders, when environmentalist’s narratives “were perceived as flaky and failed to transform” (Robèrt 7). To do this, Gilley reconstitutes social and environmental problems (such as conflict) within a market metric, and presents the market as a viable and efficient solution. Consequently, Gilley asserts that “we live in a culture of war because war makes money, we need to live in a culture of peace,” and this depends on “if we can make it economical, if we can make the numbers add up” (Unleash).Social enterprises often eschew formal charity and Gilley is consistent with this when he states that “for me, I think it has to be about business. [...] I think if it’s about charity it’s not going to work for me.” Gilley asserts that partnerships with corporations are essential as “our world is going to change, when the corporate sector becomes engaged.” He, therefore, “want[s] to work with large corporations” in order to “empower individuals to be involved in the process of [creating] a more peaceful and sustainable world” (Unleash). One example of POD’s success in this regard is a co-venture with Coca-Cola.To coincide with Peace Day in 2007, POD and Coca-Cola entered into a co-branding exercise which culminated in a sponsorship deal with the POD logo printed on Coca-Cola packaging. Prior to this, Gilley faced a desperate financial situation and conceded that the only alternative to a co-venture with Coca-Cola was shutting down POD (Day After). While Coca-Cola offered financial support and the potential to spread Gilley’s message through the medium of the Coke can, POD presumably offered good publicity to a corporation persistently the target of allegations of unethical practice (for example, Levenson-Estrada; Gill; Thomas). Gilley was aware of the potential image problems caused by a venture with Coke but accepted the partnership on pragmatic grounds, and with the proviso that Coke’s sponsorship not accompany any attempt to influence POD. Gilley, in effect, was using Coca-Cola, displaying the political independence of the social visionary and the pragmatism of the entrepreneur. By the same token, Coca-Cola was using POD to garner positive publicity, demonstrating the nature of this “win-win” relationship.In his film, Gilley consults Ray C. Anderson, social enterprise proponent, about his ethical concerns. Anderson explains the merits of working with Coke. In his Unleash addresses, such ethical considerations do not feature. Instead, it is relayed that Coca-Cola executives were looking to become involved with a social campaign, consistent with the famous 1970s hilltop advertisement of “teaching the world to sing in harmony.” From a meeting at Coca-Cola’s headquarters in Atlanta, Gilley reveals, a correlation emerged between Gilley’s emphasis on Peace Day as a moment of global unity—encapsulated by his belief that “the thing about corporations [...] the wonderful thing about everybody […] is that everybody’s just like us” (Unleash)—and the image of worldwide harmony that Coca-Cola wanted to portray. It is my contention that Gilley’s public persona underpinned the manner in which this co-branding campaign emerged. This is because his persona neatly tied the profit motive of the corporation to the socially spirited nature of the campaign, and spoke to Coca-Cola in a manner relatable to the market. At the same time, it promoted a social campaign premised on an inclusiveness that recast the corporation as a concerned global citizen, and the social campaigner as a free-market agent.Persona in the Competitive Non-Profit SectorThrough a series of works P. David Marshall charts the increasing centrality of individuality as “one of the ideological mainstays of consumer capitalism [...and] equally one of the ideological mainstays of how democracy is conceived” (Marshall “New Media-New Self” 635). Celebrity, accordingly, can be thought of as a powerful discourse that works “to make the cultural centrality of individuality concretely real” (Marshall “New Media-New Self” 635). Beyond celebrity, Marshall offers a wider framework that maps how “personalisation, individuality, and the move from the private to the public are now part of the wider populace rather than just at play in the representational field of celebrity” (Marshall, “Persona” 158). This framework includes fundamental changes to the global, specifically Western, labour market that, while not a fait accompli, point to a more competitive environment in which “greater portions of the culture are engaged in regular—probably frequent—selling of themselves” and where self-promotion becomes a key tool (Marshall, “Persona” 158). Therefore, while consumerism comprises a backdrop to the proliferation of celebrity culture, competition within market capitalism contributes to the wider expansion of personalisation and individualism.The non-profit sector is also a competitive environment. UK studies have found an increase in the number of International NGOs of 46.6% from 1995/6-2005/6 (Anheier, Kaldor, and Glasius. 310). At the same time, the number of large charities (with an income greater than £10 million) rose, between 1999-2013, from 307 to 1,005 and their annual income rose from approximately £10bn to £36bn (Charity Commission). These quantitative changes in the sector have occurred alongside qualitative changes in terms of the orientation of individual organisations. For example, Epstein and Gang describe a non-profit sector in which NGOs compete against each other for funds from aid donors (state and private). It is unclear whether “aid will be allocated properly, say to the poorest or to maximize the social welfare” or to the “efficient aid-seekers” (294)—that is, NGOs with the greatest competitive capabilities. A market for public awareness has also emerged and, in an increasingly crowded non-profit sector, it is clearly important for organisations to establish a public profile that can gain attention.It is in this competitive environment that the public personae of activists become assets for NGOs, and Gilley constitutes a successful example of this. His persona demonstrates an organisation’s response to the competitive nature of the non-profit sector, by appealing to both traditional activist circles and the business sector, and articulating the social enterprise movement. Gilley effectively embodies social entrepreneurship—in his appearance, his performance and his back-story—bridging a gap between the for- and non-profit sectors. His persona helps legitimate efforts to recast the activist as an entrepreneur (and conversely, entrepreneurs as activists) by incorporating activist ideals (in this instance, peace) within a market framework. This, to return to Marshall’s argument, crystallises the issue of peace within market metrics such and normativises debates about the role of corporate actors as global citizens, presenting it as pragmatism and therefore “common sense.” This is not to undermine Gilley’s achievements but, instead, to point out how reading his public persona enables an understanding of efforts to marketise the non-profit sector and align peace activism with corporate power.References Anheier, Helmut K., Mary Kaldor, and Marlies Glasius. Global Civil Society 2006/7. London: Sage, 2007.BBC Storyville. Director Interview: Jeremy Gilley. BBC. 2004. 7 Feb. 2010.Beder, Sharon. Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism. Totnes, UK: Green Books, 2002.Bishop, Matthew, and Michael Green. Philanthrocapitalism. London: A&C Black, 2008.Bornstein, David, and Susan Davis. Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.Charity Commission for England and Wales. “Sector Facts and Figures.” N.d. 5 Apr 2014.Day after Peace, The. Dir. Jeremy Gilley. Peace One Day, 2008.Dees, J. Gregory, and Peter Economy. "Social Entrepreneurship." Enterprising Nonprofits: A Toolkit for Social Entrepreneurs. Eds. J. Gregory Dees, Jed Emerson, and Peter Economy. New York: Wiley, 2001. 1-18.Epstein, Gil S., and Ira N. Gang. “Contests, NGOs, and Decentralizing Aid.” Review of Development Economics 10. 2 (2006): 285-296.Florida, Richard. The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent. New York: Harper Business, 2006.Frances, Nic. The End of Charity: Time for Social Enterprise. New South Wales: Allen & Unwin, 2008.Fraser, Nick. “Can One Man Persuade the World, via the UN, to Sanction a Global Ceasefire Day?” BBC. 2005. 7 Feb. 2010.Gill, Leslie. “Labor and Human Rights: The ‘Real Thing’ in Colombia.” Transforming Anthropology 13.2 (2005): 110-115.Gilley, Jeremy. “Dream One Day.” Peace One Day. 2009. 23 Jun 2010.Levenson-Estrada, Deborah. Trade Unionists against Terror: Guatemala City, 1954-1985. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1994.Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.Marshall, P. David. “Intimately Intertwined in the Most Public Way: Celebrity and Journalism.” The Celebrity Culture Reader. Ed. P. David Marshall. Oxon: Routledge, 2006. 316-323.Marshall, P. David. “New Media – New Self: The Changing Power of Celebrity.” The Celebrity Culture Reader. Ed. P. David. Marshall. Oxon: Routledge, 2006. 634-644.Marshall, P. David. “Personifying Agency: The Public–Persona–Place–Issue Continuum.” Celebrity Studies 4.3 (2013): 369-371.Marshall, P. David. “Persona Studies: Mapping the Proliferation of the Public Self.” Journalism 15.2 (2014): 153-170.Newsnight. BBC 2. 20 Sep. 2010. 22.30-23.00.Peace One Day. Dir. Jeremy Gilley. Peace One Day, 2004.Peace One Day Concert: Live at the Royal Albert Hall Gilley. Dir. Jeremy Gilley. Peace One Day, 2008.Peace One Day Part Three. Dir. Jeremy Gilley. Peace One Day, 2010.Robèrt, Karl-Henrik. The Natural Step: Seeding a Quiet Revolution. Gabriola Island, British Columbia: New Society Publishers, 2002.Thomas, Mark. Belching Out the Devil: Global Adventure with Coca-Cola. London: Ebury Press, 2008.United Nations General Assembly. “International Day of Peace. A/RES/55/282" 111th Plenary Meeting. 2001. 10 June 2014 ‹http://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/RES/55/282&Lang=E›.Unleash Your Power of Influence. Triumphant Events and Peace One Day. 2010.

In Australia the “intimacy” of citizenship (Berlant 2), is often used to reinforce subscription to heteronormative romantic and familial structures. Because this framing promotes discourses of moral failure, recent political attention to sexuality and same-sex couples can be filtered through insights into coalitional affiliations. This paper uses contemporary shifts in Australian politics and culture to think through the concept of coalition, and in particular to analyse connections between sexuality and governmentality (or more specifically normative bias and same-sex relationships) in what I’m calling post-coalitional Australia. Against the unpredictability of changing parties and governments, allegiances and alliances, this paper suggests the continuing adherence to a heteronormatively arranged public sphere. After the current Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard deposed the previous leader, Kevin Rudd, she clung to power with the help of independents and the Greens, and clichés of a “rainbow coalition” and a “new paradigm” were invoked to describe the confused electorate and governmental configuration. Yet in 2007, a less confused Australia decisively threw out the Howard–led Liberal and National Party coalition government after eleven years, in favour of Rudd’s own rainbow coalition: a seemingly invigorated party focussed on gender equity, Indigenous Australians, multi-cultural visibility, workplace relations, Austral-Asian relations, humane refugee processing, the environment, and the rights and obligations of same-sex couples. A post-coalitional Australia invokes something akin to “aftermath culture” (Lambert and Simpson), referring not just to Rudd’s fall or Howard’s election loss, but to the broader shifting contexts within which most Australian citizens live, and within which they make sense of the terms “Australia” and “Australian”. Contemporary Australia is marked everywhere by cracks in coalitions and shifts in allegiances and belief systems – the Coalition of the Willing falling apart, the coalition government crushed by defeat, deposed leaders, and unlikely political shifts and (re)alignments in the face of a hung parliament and renewed pushes toward moral and cultural change. These breakdowns in allegiances are followed by swift symbolically charged manoeuvres. Gillard moved quickly to repair relations with mining companies damaged by Rudd’s plans for a mining tax and to water down frustration with the lack of a sustainable Emissions Trading Scheme. And one of the first things Kevin Rudd did as Prime Minister was to change the fittings and furnishings in the Prime Ministerial office, of which Wright observed that “Mr Howard is gone and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has moved in, the Parliament House bureaucracy has ensured all signs of the old-style gentlemen's club… have been banished” (The Age, 5 Dec. 2007). Some of these signs were soon replaced by Ms. Gillard herself, who filled the office in turn with memorabilia from her beloved Footscray, an Australian Rules football team. In post-coalitional Australia the exile of the old Menzies’ desk and a pair of Chesterfield sofas works alongside the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and renewed pledges for military presence in Afghanistan, apologising to stolen generations of Indigenous Australians, the first female Governor General, deputy Prime Minister and then Prime Minister (the last two both Gillard), the repealing of disadvantageous workplace reform, a focus on climate change and global warming (with limited success as stated), a public, mandatory paid maternity leave scheme, changes to the processing and visas of refugees, and the amendments to more than one hundred laws that discriminate against same sex couples by the pre-Gillard, Rudd-led Labor government. The context for these changes was encapsulated in an announcement from Rudd, made in March 2008: Our core organising principle as a Government is equality of opportunity. And advancing people and their opportunities in life, we are a Government which prides itself on being blind to gender, blind to economic background, blind to social background, blind to race, blind to sexuality. (Rudd, “International”) Noting the political possibilities and the political convenience of blindness, this paper navigates the confusing context of post-coalitional Australia, whilst proffering an understanding of some of the cultural forces at work in this age of shifting and unstable alliances. I begin by interrogating the coalitional impulse post 9/11. I do this by connecting public coalitional shifts to the steady withdrawal of support for John Howard’s coalition, and movement away from George Bush’s Coalition of the Willing and the War on Terror. I then draw out a relationship between the rise and fall of such affiliations and recent shifts within government policy affecting same-sex couples, from former Prime Minister Howard’s amendments to The Marriage Act 1961 to the Rudd-Gillard administration’s attention to the discrimination in many Australian laws. Sexual Citizenship and Coalitions Rights and entitlements have always been constructed and managed in ways that live out understandings of biopower and social death (Foucault History; Discipline). The disciplining of bodies, identities and pleasures is so deeply entrenched in government and law that any non-normative claim to rights requires the negotiation of existing structures. Sexual citizenship destabilises the post-coalitional paradigm of Australian politics (one of “equal opportunity” and consensus) by foregrounding the normative biases that similarly transcend partisan politics. Sexual citizenship has been well excavated in critical work from Evans, Berlant, Weeks, Richardson, and Bell and Binnie’s The Sexual Citizen which argues that “many of the current modes of the political articulation of sexual citizenship are marked by compromise; this is inherent in the very notion itself… the twinning of rights with responsibilities in the logic of citizenship is another way of expressing compromise… Every entitlement is freighted with a duty” (2-3). This logic extends to political and economic contexts, where “natural” coalition refers primarily to parties, and in particular those “who have powerful shared interests… make highly valuable trades, or who, as a unit, can extract significant value from others without much risk of being split” (Lax and Sebinius 158). Though the term is always in some way politicised, it need not refer only to partisan, multiparty or multilateral configurations. The subscription to the norms (or normativity) of a certain familial, social, religious, ethnic, or leisure groups is clearly coalitional (as in a home or a front, a club or a team, a committee or a congregation). Although coalition is interrogated in political and social sciences, it is examined frequently in mathematical game theory and behavioural psychology. In the former, as in Axelrod’s The Evolution of Cooperation, it refers to people (or players) who collaborate to successfully pursue their own self-interests, often in the absence of central authority. In behavioural psychology the focus is on group formations and their attendant strategies, biases and discriminations. Experimental psychologists have found “categorizing individuals into two social groups predisposes humans to discriminate… against the outgroup in both allocation of resources and evaluation of conduct” (Kurzban, Tooby and Cosmides 15387). The actions of social organisation (and not unseen individual, supposedly innate impulses) reflect the cultural norms in coalitional attachments – evidenced by the relationship between resources and conduct that unquestioningly grants and protects the rights and entitlements of the larger, heteronormatively aligned “ingroup”. Terror Management Particular attention has been paid to coalitional formations and discriminatory practices in America and the West since September 11, 2001. Terror Management Theory or TMT (Greenberg, Pyszczynski and Solomon) has been the main framework used to explain the post-9/11 reassertion of large group identities along ideological, religious, ethnic and violently nationalistic lines. Psychologists have used “death-related stimuli” to explain coalitional mentalities within the recent contexts of globalised terror. The fear of death that results in discriminatory excesses is referred to as “mortality salience”, with respect to the highly visible aspects of terror that expose people to the possibility of their own death or suffering. Naverette and Fessler find “participants… asked to contemplate their own deaths exhibit increases in positive evaluations of people whose attitudes and values are similar to their own, and derogation of those holding dissimilar views” (299). It was within the climate of post 9/11 “mortality salience” that then Prime Minister John Howard set out to change The Marriage Act 1961 and the Family Law Act 1975. In 2004, the Government modified the Marriage Act to eliminate flexibility with respect to the definition of marriage. Agitation for gay marriage was not as noticeable in Australia as it was in the U.S where Bush publicly rejected it, and the UK where the Civil Union Act 2004 had just been passed. Following Bush, Howard’s “queer moral panic” seemed the perfect decoy for the increased scrutiny of Australia’s involvement in the Iraq war. Howard’s changes included outlawing adoption for same-sex couples, and no recognition for legal same-sex marriages performed in other countries. The centrepiece was the wording of The Marriage Amendment Act 2004, with marriage now defined as a union “between a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others”. The legislation was referred to by the Australian Greens Senator Bob Brown as “hateful”, “the marriage discrimination act” and the “straight Australia policy” (Commonwealth 26556). The Labor Party, in opposition, allowed the changes to pass (in spite of vocal protests from one member) by concluding the legal status of same-sex relations was in no way affected, seemingly missing (in addition to the obvious symbolic and physical discrimination) the equation of same-sex recognition with terror, terrorism and death. Non-normative sexual citizenship was deployed as yet another form of “mortality salience”, made explicit in Howard’s description of the changes as necessary in protecting the sanctity of the “bedrock institution” of marriage and, wait for it, “providing for the survival of the species” (Knight, 5 Aug. 2003). So two things seem to be happening here: the first is that when confronted with the possibility of their own death (either through terrorism or gay marriage) people value those who are most like them, joining to devalue those who aren’t; the second is that the worldview (the larger religious, political, social perspectives to which people subscribe) becomes protection from the potential death that terror/queerness represents. Coalition of the (Un)willing Yet, if contemporary coalitions are formed through fear of death or species survival, how, for example, might these explain the various forms of risk-taking behaviours exhibited within Western democracies targeted by such terrors? Navarette and Fessler (309) argue that “affiliation defences are triggered by a wider variety of threats” than “existential anxiety” and that worldviews are “in turn are reliant on ‘normative conformity’” (308) or “normative bias” for social benefits and social inclusions, because “a normative orientation” demonstrates allegiance to the ingroup (308-9). Coalitions are founded in conformity to particular sets of norms, values, codes or belief systems. They are responses to adaptive challenges, particularly since September 11, not simply to death but more broadly to change. In troubled times, coalitions restore a shared sense of predictability. In Howard’s case, he seemed to say, “the War in Iraq is tricky but we have a bigger (same-sex) threat to deal with right now. So trust me on both fronts”. Coalitional change as reflective of adaptive responses thus serves the critical location of subsequent shifts in public support. Before and since September 11 Australians were beginning to distinguish between moderation and extremism, between Christian fundamentalism and productive forms of nationalism. Howard’s unwavering commitment to the American-led war in Iraq saw Australia become a member of another coalition: the Coalition of the Willing, a post 1990s term used to describe militaristic or humanitarian interventions in certain parts of the world by groups of countries. Howard (in Pauly and Lansford 70) committed Australia to America’s fight but also to “civilization's fight… of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom”. Although Bush claimed an international balance of power and influence within the coalition (94), some countries refused to participate, many quickly withdrew, and many who signed did not even have troops. In Australia, the war was never particularly popular. In 2003, forty-two legal experts found the war contravened International Law as well as United Nations and Geneva conventions (Sydney Morning Herald 26 Feb. 2003). After the immeasurable loss of Iraqi life, and as the bodies of young American soldiers (and the occasional non-American) began to pile up, the official term “coalition of the willing” was quietly abandoned by the White House in January of 2005, replaced by a “smaller roster of 28 countries with troops in Iraq” (ABC News Online 22 Jan. 2005). The coalition and its larger war on terror placed John Howard within the context of coalitional confusion, that when combined with the domestic effects of economic and social policy, proved politically fatal. The problem was the unclear constitution of available coalitional configurations. Howard’s continued support of Bush and the war in Iraq compounded with rising interest rates, industrial relations reform and a seriously uncool approach to the environment and social inclusion, to shift perceptions of him from father of the nation to dangerous, dithery and disconnected old man. Post-Coalitional Change In contrast, before being elected Kevin Rudd sought to reframe Australian coalitional relationships. In 2006, he positions the Australian-United States alliance outside of the notion of military action and Western territorial integrity. In Rudd-speak the Howard-Bush-Blair “coalition of the willing” becomes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “willingness of the heart”. The term coalition was replaced by terms such as dialogue and affiliation (Rudd, “Friends”). Since the 2007 election, Rudd moved quickly to distance himself from the agenda of the coalition government that preceded him, proposing changes in the spirit of “blindness” toward marginality and sexuality. “Fix-it-all” Rudd as he was christened (Sydney Morning Herald 29 Sep. 2008) and his Labor government began to confront the legacies of colonial history, industrial relations, refugee detention and climate change – by apologising to Aboriginal people, timetabling the withdrawal from Iraq, abolishing the employee bargaining system Workchoices, giving instant visas and lessening detention time for refugees, and signing the Kyoto Protocol agreeing (at least in principle) to reduce green house gas emissions. As stated earlier, post-coalitional Australia is not simply talking about sudden change but an extension and a confusion of what has gone on before (so that the term resembles postcolonial, poststructural and postmodern because it carries the practices and effects of the original term within it). The post-coalitional is still coalitional to the extent that we must ask: what remains the same in the midst of such visible changes? An American focus in international affairs, a Christian platform for social policy, an absence of financial compensation for the Aboriginal Australians who received such an eloquent apology, the lack of coherent and productive outcomes in the areas of asylum and climate change, and an impenetrable resistance to the idea of same-sex marriage are just some of the ways in which these new governments continue on from the previous one. The Rudd-Gillard government’s dealings with gay law reform and gay marriage exemplify the post-coalitional condition. Emulating Christ’s relationship to “the marginalised and the oppressed”, and with Gillard at his side, Rudd understandings of the Christian Gospel as a “social gospel” (Rudd, “Faith”; see also Randell-Moon) to table changes to laws discriminating against gay couples – guaranteeing hospital visits, social security benefits and access to superannuation, resembling de-facto hetero relationships but modelled on the administering and registration of relationships, or on tax laws that speak primarily to relations of financial dependence – with particular reference to children. The changes are based on the report, Same Sex, Same Entitlements (HREOC) that argues for the social competence of queer folk, with respect to money, property and reproduction. They speak the language of an equitable economics; one that still leaves healthy and childless couples with limited recognition and advantage but increased financial obligation. Unable to marry in Australia, same-sex couples are no longer single for taxation purposes, but are now simultaneously subject to forms of tax/income auditing and governmental revenue collection should either same-sex partner require assistance from social security as if they were married. Heteronormative Coalition Queer citizens can quietly stake their economic claims and in most states discreetly sign their names on a register before becoming invisible again. Mardi Gras happens but once a year after all. On the topic of gay marriage Rudd and Gillard have deferred to past policy and to the immoveable nature of the law (and to Howard’s particular changes to marriage law). That same respect is not extended to laws passed by Howard on industrial relations or border control. In spite of finding no gospel references to Jesus the Nazarene “expressly preaching against homosexuality” (Rudd, “Faith”), and pre-election promises that territories could govern themselves with respect to same sex partnerships, the Rudd-Gillard government in 2008 pressured the ACT to reduce its proposed partnership legislation to that of a relationship register like the ones in Tasmania and Victoria, and explicitly demanded that there be absolutely no ceremony – no mimicking of the real deal, of the larger, heterosexual citizens’ “ingroup”. Likewise, with respect to the reintroduction of same-sex marriage legislation by Greens senator Sarah Hanson Young in September 2010, Gillard has so far refused a conscience vote on the issue and restated the “marriage is between a man and a woman” rhetoric of her predecessors (Topsfield, 30 Sep. 2010). At the same time, she has agreed to conscience votes on euthanasia and openly declared bi-partisan (with the federal opposition) support for the war in Afghanistan. We see now, from Howard to Rudd and now Gillard, that there are some coalitions that override political differences. As psychologists have noted, “if the social benefits of norm adherence are the ultimate cause of the individual’s subscription to worldviews, then the focus and salience of a given individual’s ideology can be expected to vary as a function of their need to ally themselves with relevant others” (Navarette and Fessler 307). Where Howard invoked the “Judaeo-Christian tradition”, Rudd chose to cite a “Christian ethical framework” (Rudd, “Faith”), that saw him and Gillard end up in exactly the same place: same sex relationships should be reduced to that of medical care or financial dependence; that a public ceremony marking relationship recognition somehow equates to “mimicking” the already performative and symbolic heterosexual institution of marriage and the associated romantic and familial arrangements. Conclusion Post-coalitional Australia refers to the state of confusion borne of a new politics of equality and change. The shift in Australia from conservative to mildly socialist government(s) is not as sudden as Howard’s 2007 federal loss or as short-lived as Gillard’s hung parliament might respectively suggest. Whilst allegiance shifts, political parties find support is reliant on persistence as much as it is on change – they decide how to buffer and bolster the same coalitions (ones that continue to privilege white settlement, Christian belief systems, heteronormative familial and symbolic practices), but also how to practice policy and social responsibility in a different way. Rudd’s and Gillard’s arguments against the mimicry of heterosexual symbolism and the ceremonial validation of same-sex partnerships imply there is one originary form of conduct and an associated sacred set of symbols reserved for that larger ingroup. Like Howard before them, these post-coalitional leaders fail to recognise, as Butler eloquently argues, “gay is to straight not as copy is to original, but as copy is to copy” (31). To make claims to status and entitlements that invoke the messiness of non-normative sex acts and romantic attachments necessarily requires the negotiation of heteronormative coalitional bias (and in some ways a reinforcement of this social power). As Bell and Binnie have rightly observed, “that’s what the hard choices facing the sexual citizen are: the push towards rights claims that make dissident sexualities fit into heterosexual culture, by demanding equality and recognition, versus the demand to reject settling for heteronormativity” (141). The new Australian political “blindness” toward discrimination produces positive outcomes whilst it explicitly reanimates the histories of oppression it seeks to redress. The New South Wales parliament recently voted to allow same-sex adoption with the proviso that concerned parties could choose not to adopt to gay couples. The Tasmanian government voted to recognise same-sex marriages and unions from outside Australia, in the absence of same-sex marriage beyond the current registration arrangements in its own state. In post-coalitional Australia the issue of same-sex partnership recognition pits parties and allegiances against each other and against themselves from within (inside Gillard’s “rainbow coalition” the Rainbow ALP group now unites gay people within the government’s own party). Gillard has hinted any new proposed legislation regarding same-sex marriage may not even come before parliament for debate, as it deals with real business. Perhaps the answer lies over the rainbow (coalition). As the saying goes, “there are none so blind as those that will not see”. References ABC News Online. “Whitehouse Scraps Coalition of the Willing List.” 22 Jan. 2005. 1 July 2007 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200501/s1286872.htm›. Axelrod, Robert. The Evolution of Cooperation. New York: Basic Books, 1984. Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. Bell, David, and John Binnie. The Sexual Citizen: Queer Politics and Beyond. Cambridge, England: Polity, 2000. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Commonwealth of Australia. Parliamentary Debates. House of Representatives 12 Aug. 2004: 26556. (Bob Brown, Senator, Tasmania.) Evans, David T. Sexual Citizenship: The Material Construction of Sexualities. London: Routledge, 1993. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. A. Sheridan. London: Penguin, 1991. ———. The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. London: Penguin, 1998. Greenberg, Jeff, Tom Pyszczynski, and Sheldon Solomon. “The Causes and Consequences of the Need for Self-Esteem: A Terror Management Theory.” Public Self, Private Self. Ed. Roy F. Baumeister. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1986. 189-212. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. Same-Sex: Same Entitlements Report. 2007. 21 Aug. 2007 ‹http://www.hreoc.gov.au/human_rights/samesex/report/index.html›. Kaplan, Morris. Sexual Justice: Democratic Citizenship and the Politics of Desire. New York: Routledge, 1997. Knight, Ben. “Howard and Costello Reject Gay Marriage.” ABC Online 5 Aug. 2003. Kurzban, Robert, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides. "Can Race Be Erased? Coalitional Computation and Social Categorization." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 98.26 (2001): 15387–15392. Lambert, Anthony, and Catherine Simpson. "Jindabyne’s Haunted Alpine Country: Producing (an) Australian Badland." M/C Journal 11.5 (2008). 20 Oct. 2010 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/81›. Lax, David A., and James K. Lebinius. “Thinking Coalitionally: Party Arithmetic Process Opportunism, and Strategic Sequencing.” Negotiation Analysis. Ed. H. Peyton Young. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1991. 153-194. Naverette, Carlos, and Daniel Fessler. “Normative Bias and Adaptive Challenges: A Relational Approach to Coalitional Psychology and a Critique of Terror Management Theory.” Evolutionary Psychology 3 (2005): 297-325. Pauly, Robert J., and Tom Lansford. Strategic Preemption: US Foreign Policy and Second Iraq War. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Randall-Moon, Holly. "Neoliberal Governmentality with a Christian Twist: Religion and Social Security under the Howard-Led Australian Government." Eds. Michael Bailey and Guy Redden. Mediating Faiths: Religion and Socio- Cultural Change in the Twenty-First Century. Farnham: Ashgate, in press. Richardson, Diane. Rethinking Sexuality. London: Sage, 2000. Rudd, Kevin. “Faith in Politics.” The Monthly 17 (2006). 31 July 2007 ‹http://www.themonthly.com.au/monthly-essays-kevin-rudd-faith-politics--300›. Rudd, Kevin. “Friends of Australia, Friends of America, and Friends of the Alliance That Unites Us All.” Address to the 15th Australian-American Leadership Dialogue. The Australian, 24 Aug. 2007. 13 Mar. 2008 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/climate/kevin-rudds-address/story-e6frg6xf-1111114253042›. Rudd, Kevin. “Address to International Women’s Day Morning Tea.” Old Parliament House, Canberra, 11 Mar. 2008. 1 Oct. 2010 ‹http://pmrudd.archive.dpmc.gov.au/node/5900›. Sydney Morning Herald. “Coalition of the Willing? Make That War Criminals.” 26 Feb. 2003. 1 July 2007 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/02/25/1046064028608.html›. Topsfield, Jewel. “Gillard Rules Out Conscience Vote on Gay Marriage.” The Age 30 Sep. 2010. 1 Oct. 2010 ‹http://www.theage.com.au/national/gillard-rules-out-conscience-vote-on-gay-marriage-20100929-15xgj.html›. Weeks, Jeffrey. "The Sexual Citizen." Theory, Culture and Society 15.3-4 (1998): 35-52. Wright, Tony. “Suite Revenge on Chesterfield.” The Age 5 Dec. 2007. 4 April 2008 ‹http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/suite-revenge-on-chesterfield/2007/12/04/1196530678384.html›.

Introduction The study of online conspiracy theory communities presents unique methodological challenges. Online conspiracy theorists often adhere to an individualistic knowledge culture of “doing one’s own research” (Fenster 158). This results in a decentralised landscape of theories, narratives and communities that challenges conventional top-down approaches to analysis. Moreover, conspiracy theories tend to be discussed on the fringes of the online ecosystem, in chat groups, small subcultural Web forums and away from mainstream social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter (Frenkel; see also De Zeeuw et al.). In this context, the messaging app Telegram has developed into a particularly prominent space (Rogers, “Deplatforming”; Urman and Katz). On the one hand, this platform is not quite part of the same mainstream as Facebook or Twitter, owing in part to its emphasis on security, “social privacy”, and lack of central moderation (Rogers, “Deplatforming”). But it is also not quite an “alternative social medium” (Gehl), as it does not position itself in opposition to mainstream platforms per se, nor does its business model centered around investor funding and advertisements present a break from the “dominant political economy” (ibid.). This ambiguous position might account for Telegram’s wide adoption, as well as its status as a relatively safe haven for communities deplatformed elsewhere – including a lively ecosystem of conspiracy theory communities (La Morgia et al.). Because Telegram communities are distributed over a wide range of channels and chat groups, they cannot always be investigated using existing analytical approaches for social media research. Confronting this challenge, we propose and discuss a method for studying Telegram communities that repurposes the “methods of the medium” (Rogers, Digital Methods). Specifically, our method appropriates Telegram’s feature of forwarding messages from one group to another to discover interlinked distributed communities, collect data from these communities for close reading, and map their information sharing practices. In this article, we will first present this approach and illustrate the types of analyses the collected data might afford in relation to a brief case study on Dutch-speaking conspiracy theories. In this short illustration, we map the convergence of right-wing and conspiratorial communities, both structurally and discursively. As Vieten discusses, “digital pandemic populism during lockdown might have pushed further the mobilisation of the far right, also on the streets”. In the Dutch context there has been a demonstrated connection between the two. Because of this connection, we were drawn to the questions of what these entanglements might look like in a relatively unmoderated Telegram environment. We then proceed to discuss some strengths and limitations, identify avenues for future research, and conclude with some ethical, methodological and epistemological reflections. Overview of Method Our method first combines expert knowledge, and the affordances of the Telegram app’s ‘search’ function to retrieve a set of channels mentioning specific politicians or political parties, as well as other marked terms that might point towards far-right or conspiratorial content. This includes wakker (awakened), variations of batavier and geus (nationalist demonyms), names of known far right politicians (such as The Netherlands’ Thierry Baudet and Flanders’ Dries Van Langenhove) and conspiracy theory activists, and volk (a term meaning roughly “our people”). As this approach precludes discovery of related groups that do not match the queries exactly, this initial curated list is then supplemented with channels advertised elsewhere, such as those featured on the Websites of far-right politicians and organisations, as well as channels covered in mainstream news media. This yields an initial expert list of channels, in our sample case of Dutch-speaking right-wing and conspiracist actors comprising 50 items. One might stop here, and collect data for this manually curated list of groups, as in Nikkhah et al.’s study of Telegram use among the Iranian diaspora in the United States, or Davey and Weinberg’s analysis of far-right groups used in the US military. But this would exclude any groups not known by the researchers; and groups are not always easy to naively discover on Telegram. Because of this, in a subsequent step, we expanded the initial set of relevant Telegram channels by crawling posts in these channels that were forwarded from other channels, constituting links between these channels. We used a custom crawler based on the open source library Selenium, which allows one to control a browser programmatically. The browser was then made to scroll through the Web-based view of the selected channels (e.g. https://t.me/s/durov). In principle, all messages ever posted in a channel are available in this view. We then follow those links, and store the names of the linked channels. Overall, this method thus presumes that if a channel forwards a message from another channel there will be some overlap in terms of topic of discussion between both, making the newly discovered channel similarly relevant to the analysis. This results in a network-like representation of connections between channels. In the context of our case study, this process expands our initial seed list to a list of over 215 relevant public channels, after discarding groups that are not germane to the case study, i.e. those that were not related to far-right or conspiracy theory-related communities. To verify this, channels were inductively coded by a team of four researchers after capture. We then repeat the data collection for this new list of channels, retrieving forwarded messages from over 370,000 total messages spanning the period 2017-2021. This dataset then serves as a starting point for structural analysis of the wider context of the community, aspects of which will be illustrated in the next section. Illustration Emphasising the value of a “quali-quanti” (Venturini and Latour) approach we offer a tentative analysis of the decentralised Dutch-speaking conspiracist narratives and communities on Telegram, and in a broader sense observe what such a distributed community may look like on the platform. This then suggests the various affordances which a dataset collected with this method can offer. Fig. 1: Network visualisation of collected channels (depth: 1) including channels forwarded from (4354 nodes). Nodes are sized and coloured by degree (amount of connections to other channels). A first observation that can be made concerns the topology of the network of channels we found (see fig. 1). A network analysis is a suitable distant reading approach for this kind of data, because it “maps and measures formal and informal relationships … viz., who knows whom, and who shares what information and knowledge with whom” (Serrat 40). It is a type of analysis that can reveal the relevance and positioning of actors and narratives within the data. In our network visualisation, we use the ForceAtlas2 algorithm (Jacomy et al.) to position the nodes. This algorithm makes more connected nodes “gravitate” towards each other; the more central a node is, the more connected it is to the rest of the network, roughly speaking (Figure 1). Highlighting the channels representing political parties shows, for example, that while the Dutch far right party FvD (FVDNL) is quite central (connected), this is not the case for the Flemish far right politician Dries Van Langenhove (kiesdries). This suggests that compared to a similar Flemish politician, the Dutch FvD is a more prominent part of the general conspiracist discussion – which is then perhaps more overtly politicised in the Dutch context. We can additionally discern channels that we might label “content aggregators”, which forward large numbers of messages from other channels but post comparatively little original content, occupying a relatively central place in the wider network. These content aggregators play an important structural role in the network, as other channels might forward messages from these collections on a “pick and choose” basis. More abstractly, they also serve to confirm thematic similarity between the channels messages are forwarded from, with the owners of the aggregator channels playing the role of a curator that collects interesting content about a certain topic of interest. Furthermore, our data reveal that the network is highly dynamic. As forwarded messages are timestamped, we can plot the graph at different moments in time. When comparing changes over a year, we can observe a significant growth in the number of channels that connect to the network particularly between 2020 and 2021 (see fig. 2). This growth, and the associated diversity of the network, can be attributed to Telegram’s role as a haven for actors that were deplatformed (or present themselves as targets of deplatforming and censorship) from other social media; a “platform of last resort”. Previous research has for instance indicated that a number of alt-right fringe actors moved to Telegram after being deplatformed from Facebook or Twitter (Rogers, “Deplatforming”). It can be hypothesised that events such as Donald Trump’s removal from Twitter around the time of the January 2021 Capitol riots might similarly have inspired other actors to move to Telegram in response to the platform policies of mainstream social media. Fig. 2: The channel network based on messages sent before June 2020 (334 nodes). Same layout and parameters as in Figure 1 (not to scale). Nodes also appearing in Figure 1 are highlighted. The structure of the network (in fig. 1) can also be used to discern ‘sub-communities’, which forward messages mutually but have relatively few links to the broader network. These can then be analysed qualitatively. This may then reveal that Flemish groups that oppose COVID-19 policies are less connected with the far right, whereas such groups that can be identified as Dutch seem to merge more easily with far-right channels. As discussed, this is also suggested by the position of FVDNL, the Dutch far-right political party Forum voor democratie (FvD) which is central in the network. On this level, this suggests that structurally, Dutch far-right parties are more explicitly affiliating themselves with conspiracy-related channels than Flemish parties. Actual textual analyses of the channels’ posts and images, however, could offer a more nuanced picture, whereby structurally unconnected channels might still share common harmful narratives, spanning anti-progressive discourse, anti-mainstream sentiments, anti-government discourse, and evocations of prominent conspiracy theories such as QAnon and The Great Reset. These structural analyses then present a number of possibilities for further content analysis, where one might for example “zoom in” on Dutch far-right groups in particular, and qualitatively study images posted therein to identify salient narratives and positions. Discussion Methodological Gains Variations of the proposed approach have been used in other work (e.g. Hashemi and Chahooki; La Morgia et al.). Most prominently, the Pushshift Telegram Dataset (Baumgartner et al.) comprises a large dataset of channel metadata, author metadata and messages. This dataset was collected by discovering new channels from an initial seed list of approximately 300 channels using forwarded messages, and then collecting messages from these channels. While there is great archival value in the resulting datasets, our approach differs from these earlier approaches in a number of instructive ways. Like other work we appropriate an affordance of Telegram – forwarded messages – for our own research purposes, but we purposely limit the extent of “following” these forwarded messages. Though one could keep following links indefinitely, not every link is a link that is structural to the distributed community of users that is of interest here. Though more extensive crawling might reveal ever more channels and associated data, these are also increasingly unlikely to be related to the initial topic of interest, and are in any case further removed from the users of the initial seed groups. For this reason, we use a relatively shallow crawl depth and only retain links up to two “hops” away from the initial seed channels. This trades a higher number of crawled channels for a higher likelihood that the captured channels are indeed relevant to the case study. The suitable crawl depth would differ from case to case. In our case, it was established empirically through pilot crawls, which were stopped once collected groups appeared to no longer be strongly connected to the initial seed groups by topic. Datasets of this type are often also difficult to reproduce or qualify. For example for the datasets compiled by La Morgia et al. as well as for Baumgartner et al., the original seed list is not provided. Because of this, it is impossible to see where the network of found groups originates and how it might be biased one way or another. We suggest that where possible, this seed list is documented and shared. In our case, this would be particularly important as the seeds represent an intentional and explicit bias; that is, Dutch-speaking conspiracy-themed and far-right groups. If the starting point of the crawl is documented, one could potentially re-collect the data later from the same starting points and compare results to those found initially, allowing for longitudinal analyses of the topology of these communities. Ethics The method described here does not deal with personally identifiable information (PII) per se; one can map the channel network on a structural level without collecting user data or analysing specific messages, when purely tracing the origin of forwarded messages. It should be noted, however, that in the process of collecting these structural data, one can potentially go further. For example, it is possible to scrape the full content of messages. When also including chat groups, user details including (user-provided) full names are also available. Their inclusion in (public) datasets should be subject to closer scrutiny than that of public channels, as the former may represent conversations had under the assumption that this conversation was more or less off the record; while the latter are explicitly intended for information broadcast. Even if many of these chat groups are technically public, we should consider that "even if users are aware of being observed by others, they do not consider the possibility that their actions and interactions may be documented and analysed in detail at a later occasion" (Sveningsson Elm 77). In many cases, a (structural) analysis of only channels strikes a good balance between collecting representative data and respecting the privacy of those who produce the collected data. Avenues for Future Research The method may be expanded in a number of ways. One could, as discussed, increase the amount of crawl iterations, which would expand the network at the potential cost of case-specificity. A larger seed list could also increase the quantity of the data, though the effect of this can often be limited, as a relatively limited amount of channels forward messages from other channels. Links between channels could be collected not only from forwarded messages, as we do here, but also via other repurposed Telegram features such as channel invitation links or simple hyperlinks to other channels found in message content. The latter would require more fine-grained parsing of the message texts through natural language processing, for example, as a hyperlink can suggest a wider range of connections than an intentionally forwarded message. Additionally, and as previously mentioned, one could include not only public channels but also public chat groups, which are often linked to these channels and offer a space for people to discuss the content posted in them. While this can be an attractive way of acquiring extra data, we forego this in our example. As discussed, there are ethical trade-offs to consider when deciding to work with data from groups; but, it can be argued that Telegram channels represent an explicit “broadcast” style of communication (Shehabat et al.). Because the channel owner(s) decide what is worthy of sharing, one can reasonably assume that if one “follows the medium” here, all content retrieved from a channel will be somewhat relevant to the channel's purported theme. Conversely, discourse in chat groups might be expected to meander into a variety of directions and can easily include many (forwarded) messages only tangentially related to the case study of interest. Conclusion In this article we have sought to present one methodological approach to studying communities on Telegram. Rather than presenting a thorough case study or a definitive analysis of the Telegram-based community we discuss, our goal was to demonstrate the method's benefits but also its potential shortcomings, avenues of further development, and what types of analysis data collected with it might afford. A cursory analysis of the fringe community we studied here shows how with such data one can map a given community or set of communities on a structural level, which may then be used to demarcate areas of interest for further content analysis. The observations presented in this article are far from a complete picture of the data collected, but can serve as suggestions for analytical avenues one might venture down in a more substantive analysis. Beyond these observations, our repurposing of “the methods of the medium” (Rogers, Digital Methods) through forwarded messages allows us to contribute an empirically informed reflection on the possibilities and limitations of studying conspiracist information sharing practices on Telegram. Our method for instance highlights tensions between public and private knowledge, whereby we only consider information from public channels, and for technical and ethical reasons omit Telegram’s closed-off, private chat groups from our analysis. Our method of sourcing channels through forwarded messages does not preclude the existence of isolated channels or clusters of channels that, for a lack of forwarded messages from channels that were already identified, elude the scope of such snowballing efforts. Along the same lines, one could imagine that a deeper, more far-reaching crawl would reveal some strange bedfellows for the initial seed that were not part of our a priori understanding and hypotheses concerning the communities of interest. All of these considerations represent choices that may be taken differently depending on the case study at hand. Statement on Data and Ethics The analysis on offer in this article is limited to names of public channels on Telegram and we purposely refrain from citing channel names or analysing specific messages so they cannot be traced back to single persons. Our analysis does not comprise live subjects or PII, and thus did not require ERB clearance from our respective institutions. The anonymised dataset described above is available upon request via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6344795. Acknowledgements We would like to thank Nathalie van Raemdonck (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) and Jasmin Seijbel (Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam) for their contributions to the empirical work underlying this article. References Baumgartner, Jason, et al. “The Pushshift Telegram Dataset.” Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 14 (2020): 840–847. Blondel, Vincent D., et al. “Fast Unfolding of Communities in Large Networks.” Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment 2008.10 (2008): P10008. Davey, Jacob, and Dana Weinberg. Influence: Discussions of the US Military in Extreme Right-Wing Telegram Channels. ISD Global, 2021. De Zeeuw, Daniel et al. “Tracing Normiefication: A Cross-Platform Analysis of the QAnon Conspiracy Theory.” First Monday 25.1 (2020). Fenster, Mark. Conspiracy Theories. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008. Frenkel, Sheera. “Facebook Amps Up Its Crackdown on QAnon.” The New York Times 6 Oct. 2020, sec. 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Rogers, Richard. “Deplatforming: Following Extreme Internet Celebrities to Telegram and Alternative Social Media.” European Journal of Communication 35.3 (2020): 213–229. ———. Digital Methods. Cambridge: MIT P, 2013. Serrat, Olivier. “Social Network Analysis.” In Knowledge Solutions: Tools, Methods, and Approaches to Drive Organizational Performance. Ed. Olivier Serrat. Singapore: Springer, 2017. 39–43. <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0983-9_9>. Shehabat, Ahmad, Teodor Mitew, and Yahia Alzoubi. “Encrypted Jihad: Investigating the Role of Telegram App in Lone Wolf Attacks in the West.” Journal of Strategic Security 10.3 (2017): 27–53. Sveningsson Elm, Malin. “How Do Various Notions of Privacy Influence Decisions in Qualitative Internet Research?” In Internet Inquiry: Conversations about Method. Eds. Annette Markham and Nancy Baym. SAGE, 2009. 69–97. Urman, Aleksandra, and Stefan Katz. “What They Do in the Shadows: Examining the Far-Right Networks on Telegram.” Information, Communication & Society (2020). Venturini, Tommaso, and Bruno Latour. “The Social Fabric: Digital Footprints and Quali-quantitative Methods.” In Proceedings of Futur en Seine 2009: The Digital Future of the City. Festival for Digital Life and Creativity, 2010. 87-101. Vieten, Ulrike M. “The ‘New Normal’ and ‘Pandemic Populism’: The COVID-19 Crisis and Anti-Hygienic Mobilisation of the Far-Right.” Social Sciences 9.9 [165] (2020).

Introduction Discourses of queer youth suicide regularly represent non-heterosexual young men as vulnerable and as victims who are inherently without strategies for coping with adversity (qv. Rasmussen; Marshall; Driver 3). Alternatively, queer youth are sometimes marked as fundamentally resilient, as avid users of tools of resilience and community such as the internet (Smith & Gray 74; Wexler et al. 566; Hillier & Harrison; Bryson & McIntosh). In the latter approach, protective factors are typically presented as specific to queer youth (e.g., Russell 10), therefore also minoritising and essentialising resilience. Both approaches ignore the diversity of queer young lives and the capacity for a subject to be both vulnerable and resilient—concepts which need to be unpacked if we are to further our understanding of minority lives. Significantly, both approaches also ignore the fact that growing up occurs in a series of transitions, cultural encounters and circumstantial changes. Queer (LGBT) youth are neither all victims and vulnerable, nor are they all self-reliant and resilient. Recent research has indicated that non-heterosexual youth continue to have a higher rate of suicide and self-harm (Cover, Queer Youth Suicide), although this is by no means indicative that vast numbers of LGBTI require support, intervention or preventative measures throughout all aspects of the transition into adult life. This article has two objectives, both of which are best addressed together in order to come at an understanding as how best to frame approaches to queer youth suicide as an ongoing social concern. Firstly, to ask what human, psychological and subjective ‘resilience’ might be said to mean in the context of public discourses of queer youth suicidality, and secondly to ask what a concept of ‘resilience’ does for queer youth identity in terms of relationality. Neither objective, of course, can be met alone in a short article—the purpose here is to open thinking on the topic in ways that question normative assumptions about the conditions of queer youth in the context of liveable lives and the positioning of resilience as reliant on normative accounts of identity. The article begins with a brief overview of the different uses of resilience in the context of broad social representations of queer youth. It goes on to discuss the It Gets Better video site which aimed to produce resilience among predominantly bullied queer youth by ‘imparting hope’. Some remarks on the relationship between identity, sexuality, sociality and resilience will conclude. Resilience and the Queer Youth Subject Developed by Crawford Holling in the 1970s, the concept of resilience was used to describe the capacity of a system to “absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations or state variables” (Holling 14). In terms of ecology and the physical sciences, the notion of resilience operates within an assumption that future events will not be known but will be unexpected, thereby requiring a capacity to accommodate those events whatever form they take (21). When later used in the psychological sciences, the term resilience likewise assumes disruption and uncertainty in lived experience, requiring a resilient subject to be capable in both learning and adaptation. In the context of queer youth, resilience, then, can be applied to mean an adaptation to new situations which exacerbate vulnerability to suicidality for those who are positioned to seek escape from intolerable emotional pain or the perception of life as unliveable (Cover, Queer Youth Suicide 10, 148). Resilience in this use presumes that, for example, bullying has a detrimental causal relationship with suicidality when it newly occurs if the subject does not have the capacity to adapt and incorporate it into everyday life. Bullying, however, is generally related to suicide only by virtue of its ongoingness rather than it being a sudden shift in social relations. Striking about much of the discourse of resilience in the psychological sciences is that the concept of resilience presumes a unitary subject who is a subject prior to relationality and sociality (e.g. Leipold & Greve; Singh et al.; Smith & Gray). Resilience is thus seen as a capacity to cope with adversity as if adversity arises prior to the subject rather than being a form of relationality that conditions the subject. In that context, the queer youth subject is understood in essentialist terms, whereby sexual subjectivity is represented simultaneously as both a norm and abnormal, and is a factor of subjectivity that is understood to pre-exist sociality. That is, the queer youth subject is queer before relationality with others, thereby before the kinds of relationalities that might demand resilience. An alternative is to understand queer youth not as vulnerable because they are queer, but as subjects constituted in the (inequitably distributed) precarity of corporeal life in sociality, and thereby already formed in (inequitably distributed) resilience to the sorts of shifts, changes and adversities that shift one from an experience of vulnerability to an experience of a life that is unliveable (Butler, Precarious Life; Frames of War). Approaching queer youth suicide from a perspective not of risk but through the simultaneous fostering and critique of resilience opens the possibility of providing solutions that aid younger persons to resist suicidality as a flight from intolerable pain without articulating the self as inviolable and thereby losing the ethical value of the recognition of vulnerability. The question, then, is whether such critique can be found in sites of resilience discourse in relation to queer youth. Queer Youth and It Gets Better The video blogging site It Gets Better (http://www.itgetsbetter.org) was begun by columnist Dan Savage in response to a spate of reported queer student suicides in September/October 2010 in the United States. The site hosts more than a thousand video contributions, many from queer adults who seek to provide hope for younger persons by showing that queer adulthood is markedly different from the experiences of harassment, bullying, loneliness or surveillance experienced by queer youth in school and family environments. This is among the first widely-available communicative media form to address directly queer youth on issues related to suicide, and the first to draw on lived experiences as a means by which to provide resources for queer youth resilience. The fact that these experiences are related through video-logs (vlogs) provides the texts with a greater sense of authenticity and a framework which often addresses youth directly on the topic of suicidality (Cover, Queer Youth Suicide). Savage’s intention was to produce resilience in queer youth by imparting ‘hope for young people facing harassment’ and to create ‘a personal way for supporters everywhere to tell LGBT youth that … it does indeed get better’ (http://www.itgetsbetter.org/pages/about-it-gets-better-project/). Hope, in this context, is represented as the core attribute of queer youth resilience. The tag-line of the site is: Many LGBT youth can’t picture what their lives might be like as openly gay adults. They can’t imagine a future for themselves. So let’s show them what our lives are like, let’s show them what the future may hold in store for them (http://www.itgetsbetter.org/). Hope for the future is frequently presented as hope for an end to school days. In the primary video of the site, Dan Savage’s partner Terry describes his school experiences: My school was pretty miserable … I was picked on mercilessly in school. People were really cruel to me. I was bullied a lot. Beat up, thrown against walls and lockers and windows; stuffed into bathroom stalls. . . . Honestly, things got better the day I left highschool. I didn’t see the bullies every day, I didn’t see the people who harassed me every day, I didn’t have to see the school administrators who would do nothing about it every day. Life instantly got better (http://www.itgetsbetter.org/pages/about-it-gets-better-project/) Such comments present a picture of school life in which the institutional norms of secondary schools that depend so heavily on surveillance, discriminative norms, economies of secrecy and disclosure permit bullying and ostracisation to flourish and become, then, the site of hopelessness in what to many appears at the time as a period of never-ending permanency. Indeed, teen-aged life has often been figured in geographic terms as a kind of hopeless banishment from the realities that are yet to come: Eve Sedgwick referred to that period as ‘that long Babylonian exile known as queer childhood’ (4). The emphatic focus on the institutional environment of highschool rather than family, rural towns, closetedness, religious discourse or feelings of isolation is remarkably important in changing the contemporary way in which the social situation of queer youth suicide has been depicted. The discourse of the It Gets Better project and contributions makes ‘school’ its object—a site that demands resilience of its queer students as the remedy to the detrimental effects of bullying. Here, however, resilience is not depicted as adaptability but the strength to tolerate and, effectively, ‘wait out’, a bullying environment. The focus on bullying that frames the dialogue on queer youth suicide and youth resilience in the It Gets Better videos is the product of a mid-2000s shift in focus to the effects of bullying on LGBT youth in place of critiques of heterosexism, sexual identity, coming out and physical violence (Fodero), regularly depicting bullying as directly causal of suicide (Kim & Leventhal 151; Espelage & Swearer 157; Hegna & Wichstrøm 35). Bullying, in these representations, is articulated as that which is, on the one hand, preventable through punitive institutional policies and, on the other, as an ineradicable fact of living through school years. It is, in the latter depiction, that experience for which younger LGBT persons must manage their own resistance. In depicting school as the site of anti-queer bullying, the It Gets Better project represents queer youth as losing hope of escape from the intolerable pain of bullying in its persistence and repetition. However, the site’s purpose is to show that escape from the school environment to what is regularly depicted as a neoliberal, white and affluent representation of queer adulthood, founded on conservative coupledom (Cover, “Object(ives) of Desire”), careers, urban living, and relative wealth—depictions somewhat different from the reality of diverse queer lives. The shift from the school-bullying in queer youth to the liberal stability of queer adulthood is figured in the It Gets Better discourse as not only possible but as that which should be anticipated. It is in that anticipation that resilience is articulated in a way which calls upon queer youth to manage their own resiliency by having or performing hopefulness. Representing hope as the performative element in queer youth resilience has precedence as a suicide prevention strategy. Hopelessness is a key factor in much of the contemporary academic discussion of suicide risk in general and is often used as a predictor for recognising suicidal behaviour (Battin 13), although it is also particularly associated with suicidality and queer teenagers. Hopelessness is usually understood as despair or desperateness, the lack of expectation of a situation or goal one desires or feels one should desire. For Holden and colleagues, hopelessness is counter to social desirability, which is understood as the capacity to describe oneself in terms by which society judges a person as legitimate or desirable (Holden, Mendonca & Serin 500). Psychological and psychiatric measurement techniques frequently rely on Aaron T. Beck’s Hopelessness Scale, which utilises a twenty-question true/false survey designed to measure feelings about the future, expectation and self-motivation in adults over the age of seventeen years as a predictor of suicidal behaviour. Beck and colleagues attempted to provide an objective measurement for hopelessness rather than leave it treated as a diffuse and vague state of feeling in patients with depression. The tool asks a series of questions, most about the future, presenting a score on whether or not the answers given were true or false. Questions include: ‘I might as well give up because I can’t make things better for myself’; ‘I can’t imagine what my life would be like in ten years’; ‘My future seems dark to me’; and ‘All I can see ahead of me is unpleasantness rather than pleasantness’. Responding true to these indicates hopelessness. Responding false to some of the following also indicates hopelessness: ‘I can look forward to more good times than bad times’; and ‘When things are going badly, I am helped by knowing they can’t stay that way forever’ (Beck). While these questions and the scale are not used uncritically, the relationship between the discursive construction through the questions of what constitutes hopelessness and the aims of the It Gets Better videos are notably comparable. The objective, then, of the videos is to provide evidence and, perhaps, instil hope that would allow such questions to be answered differently, particularly to be able to give a true response to the last question above. Hallway Allies liaison support group, which operates across university campuses and high schools to prevent bullying, stated in this representative way in the introduction to their video contribution: ‘Remember to keep your head up, highschool doesn’t last forever’ (http://www.itgetsbetter.org/video /entry/5wwozgwyruy/). Or, as Rebecca in the introductory statement of another video contribution put it: You may be feeling like this pain will last forever, like you have no control, it’s dark, oppressive and feels like there is no end. I know – I get it. but I promise … hang in there and you’ll find it … Wait – you’ll see – it gets better! (http://www.itgetsbetter.org/video/entry/wxymqzw3oqy/). As can be seen, such video examples respond to a discourse of hopelessness aligned with the framework exemplified by Beck’s scale, prompting queer youth audiences of these videos to imagine a future for themselves, to understand hope in temporal terms of future wellbeing, and to know that the future does not necessarily hold the same kinds of unpleasantness as experienced in the everyday high school environment. Sexual Identity, Resilience and the Normative Lifecycle In the It Gets Better framework, resilience is produced in the knowledge of a queer life that is linear and patterned through stages in relation to institutional forms of belonging (and non-belonging). That is, a queer life is represented as one which undergoes the hardship of being bullied in school, of leaving that institutional environment for a queer adulthood that is built on a myth of safety, pleasure, success and a distinctive break from the environment of the past (as if the psyche or the self is re-produced anew in a phase of a queer lifecycle). Working within a queer theoretical and cultural understanding of identity, sexual subjectivity can be understood as constituted in social and cultural formations. Overturning the previously-held liberal notion of power as the power which represses sex and sexualities, Foucault’s History of Sexuality provided queer theory with an argument in which power, as deployed through discourse and discursive formations, produces the coherent sexual subject. This occurs historically and only in specific periods. In Foucault’s analysis, homosexual identities become conceivable in the Nineteenth Century as a result of specific juridical, medical and criminal discourses (85). From a Foucauldian perspective, there is no subject driven by an inner psyche or a pre-determined desire (as in psychoanalysis). Instead, such subjectivity occurs in and through the power/knowledge network of discourse as it writes or scripts the subject into subjectivity. Canonical queer theorist Judith Butler has been central in extending Foucault’s analysis in ways which are pragmatic for understanding queer youth in the context of growing up and transitioning into adulthood. Her theory of performativity has usefully complexified the ways in which we can understand sexual identity and allowed us to overcome the core assumption in much queer youth research that heterosexual and homosexual identities are natural, mutually-exclusive and innate; instead, allowing us to focus on how the process of subject formation for youth is implicated in the tensions and pressures of a range of cultural, social, organisational and communicative encounters and engagements. Butler projects the most useful post-structuralist discussion of subjectivity by suggesting that the subject is constituted by repetitive performances in terms of the structure of signification that produces retroactively the illusion of an inner subjective core (Butler, Gender Trouble 143). Queer identity becomes a normative ideal rather than a descriptive feature of experience, and is the resultant effect of regimentary discursive practices (16, 18). The non-heterosexual subject, then, is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are formed as recognisable identity performances in the context, here, of a set of lifecycle expectations built through a vulnerable queer childhood, being bullied, attaining hope, leaving school and fruition in queer adulthood. Resilience, in the It Gets Better discourse, then, is seen to be produced in understanding the stages of a normative queer life. An issue emerges for how queer youth suicide is understood within this particular formation that posits non-heterosexuality as the problematic source of suicidality emerges in the assumption that the vulnerability to suicidal behaviours for queer youth is the result singularly of sexuality, rather than looking to the fact that sexuality is one facet of identity – an important and sometimes fraught one for adolescents in general – located within a complex of other formations of identity and selfhood. This is part of what Diana Fuss has identified as the “synecdochical tendency to see only one part of a subject’s identity (usually the most visible part) and to make that part stand for the whole” (116). This ignores the opportunity to think through the conditions of queer youth in terms of the interaction between different facets of identity (such as gender and ethnicity, but also personal experience), different contexts in which identity is performed and different institutional settings that vary in response and valuation of non-normative aspects of subjectivity, thereby allowing a vulnerability not to be an attribute of being a queer youth, but to be understood as produced across a nuanced and complex array of factors. While the very concept of resilience invokes both an individualisation of the subject and a disciplinary regime of pastoral care (Foucault, Abnormal), queer youth in the It Gets Better discourse of hope are depicted multiply as: Inherently vulnerable and lacking resilience as a result of an essentialist notion of sexual orientation.Constituted in a relationality within a schooling environment that is conditioned by bullying as the primary expression of diverse socialityFinding resilience only through a self-managed and self-articulated expression of ‘hope’ that is to be produced in the knowledge that there is an ‘escape’ from a school environment. What the discourse of that which we might refer to as “resilient hopefulness” does is represent queer youth reductively as inherently non-resilient. It ignores the multiple expressions of sexual identity, the capacity to respond to suicidality through a critique of normative sexual subjectivity, and the capabilities of queer youth to develop meaningful relationships across all sexual possibilities that are, themselves, forms of resilience or at least mitigations of vulnerability. At the same time, “resilient hopefulness” is produced within a context in which a normative sociality of bullying culture is expressed as timeless and unchangeable (rather than historical and institutional), thereby requiring queer younger persons to undertake the task of managing vulnerability, risk, resilience and identity as an individualised responsibility outside of communities of care. Whether the presentation of a normative lifecycle is genuinely a preventative measure for queer youth suicidality is that which suicidologists and practitioners must test, although one might argue at this stage that resilience is better produced through a broader appeal to social diversity rather than the regimentation of a queer life that must ‘wait in hope’ for a liveability that may never come. References Battin, Margaret Pabst. Ethical Issues in Suicide. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1995. Beck, Aaron T., Arlene Weissman, Larry Trexler, and David Lester. “The Measurement of Pessimism: The Hopelessness Scale” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 42.6 (1974): 861–865. Bryson, Mary K., and Lori B. MacIntosh. “Can We Play ‘Fun Gay’?: Disjuncture and Difference, and the Precarious Mobilities of Millennial Queer Youth Narratives.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 23.1 (2010): 101-124. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London & New York: Routledge, 1990. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life. London: Verso, 2004. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London and New York: Verso, 2009. Cover, Rob. “Object(ives) of Desire: Romantic Coupledom versus Promiscuity, Subjectivity and Sexual Identity.”Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 24.2 (2010): 251-263. Cover, Rob. Queer Youth Suicide, Culture and Identity: Unliveable Lives? London: Ashgate, 2012. Driver, Susan. “Introducing Queer Youth Cultures.” Queer Youth Cultures. Ed. Susan Driver. Albany, NY: SUNY Press (2008). 1-18. Espelage, Dorothy L., and Susan M. Swearer. “Addressing Research Gaps in the Intersection between Homophobia and Bullying.” School Psychology Review 37.2 (2008): 155–159. Fodero, Lisa. “Teen Violinist Dies after Student Internet Lark.” The Age, 1 Oct. 2010. 1 Oct. 2010 ‹http://www.theage.com.au/world/>. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. London: Penguin, 1990. Foucault, Michel. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975. Eds. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salmoni. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2004. Fuss, Diana. Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature & Difference. New York and London: Routledge, 1989. Hegna, Kristinn, and Lars Wichstrøm. “Suicide Attempts among Norwegian Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youths: General and Specific Risk Factors.” Acta Sociologica 50.1 (2007): 21–37. Hillier, Lynne, and Lyn Harrison. “Building Realities Less Limited than Their Own: Young People Practising Same-Sex Attraction on the Internet.” Sexualities 10.1 (2007): 82-100. Holden, Ronald R., James C. Mendonca and Ralph C. Serin. “Suicide, Hopelessness, and social desirability: A Test of an Interactive Model.” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 57.4 (1989): 500–504. Holling, C. S. “Resilience and Stabity of Ecological Systems.” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4 (1973): 1-23. Kim, Young Shin, and Bennett Leventhal. “Bullying and Suicide. A Review.” International Journal of Adolescent Medical Health 20.2 (2008): 133–154. Leipold, Bernhard, and Werner Greve. “Resilience: A Conceptual Bridge between Coping and Development.” European Psychologist 14.1 (2009): 40-50. Marshall, Daniel. “Popular Culture, the ‘Victim’ Trope and Queer Youth Analytics.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 23.1 (2010): 65-86. Rasmussen, Mary Lou. Becoming Subjects: Sexualities and Secondary Schooling. New York: Routledge, 2006. Russell, Stephen T. “Beyond Risk: Resilience in the Lives of Sexual Minority Youth.” Journal of Gay & Lesbian Issues in Education 2.3 (2005): 5-18. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel.” GLQ 1.1 (1993): 1–14. Singh, Anneliese A., Danica G. Hays, and Larel S. Watson. “Strength in the Face of Adversity: Resilience Strategies of Transgender Individuals.” Journal of Counseling & Development 89.1 (2011): 20-27. Smith, Mark. S., and Susan W. Gray. “The Courage to Challenge: A New Measure of Hardiness in LGBT Adults.” Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services 21.1 (2009): 73-89. Wexler, Lisa Marin, Gloria DiFluvio, and Tracey K. Burke. “Resilience and Marginalized Youth: Making a Case for Personal and Collective Meaning-Making as Part of Resilience Research in Public Health.” Social Science & Medicine 69.4 (2009): 565-570.

There is no diagram that does not also include, besides the points it connects up, certain relatively free or unbounded points, points of creativity, change and resistance, and it is perhaps with these that we ought to begin in order to understand the whole picture. (Deleuze, “Foucault” 37) Monty Cantsin: Why do we use a pervert software robot to exploit our collective consensual mind? Letitia: Because we want the thief to be a digital entity. Monty Cantsin: But isn’t this really blasphemic? Letitia: Yes, but god – in our case a meta-cocktail of authorship and copyright – can not be trusted anymore. (Amazon Noir, “Dialogue”) In 2006, some 3,000 digital copies of books were silently “stolen” from online retailer Amazon.com by targeting vulnerabilities in the “Search inside the Book” feature from the company’s website. Over several weeks, between July and October, a specially designed software program bombarded the Search Inside!™ interface with multiple requests, assembling full versions of texts and distributing them across peer-to-peer networks (P2P). Rather than a purely malicious and anonymous hack, however, the “heist” was publicised as a tactical media performance, Amazon Noir, produced by self-proclaimed super-villains Paolo Cirio, Alessandro Ludovico, and Ubermorgen.com. While controversially directed at highlighting the infrastructures that materially enforce property rights and access to knowledge online, the exploit additionally interrogated its own interventionist status as theoretically and politically ambiguous. That the “thief” was represented as a digital entity or machinic process (operating on the very terrain where exchange is differentiated) and the emergent act of “piracy” was fictionalised through the genre of noir conveys something of the indeterminacy or immensurability of the event. In this short article, I discuss some political aspects of intellectual property in relation to the complexities of Amazon Noir, particularly in the context of control, technological action, and discourses of freedom. Software, Piracy As a force of distribution, the Internet is continually subject to controversies concerning flows and permutations of agency. While often directed by discourses cast in terms of either radical autonomy or control, the technical constitution of these digital systems is more regularly a case of establishing structures of operation, codified rules, or conditions of possibility; that is, of guiding social processes and relations (McKenzie, “Cutting Code” 1-19). Software, as a medium through which such communication unfolds and becomes organised, is difficult to conceptualise as a result of being so event-orientated. There lies a complicated logic of contingency and calculation at its centre, a dimension exacerbated by the global scale of informational networks, where the inability to comprehend an environment that exceeds the limits of individual experience is frequently expressed through desires, anxieties, paranoia. Unsurprisingly, cautionary accounts and moral panics on identity theft, email fraud, pornography, surveillance, hackers, and computer viruses are as commonplace as those narratives advocating user interactivity. When analysing digital systems, cultural theory often struggles to describe forces that dictate movement and relations between disparate entities composed by code, an aspect heightened by the intensive movement of informational networks where differences are worked out through the constant exposure to unpredictability and chance (Terranova, “Communication beyond Meaning”). Such volatility partially explains the recent turn to distribution in media theory, as once durable networks for constructing economic difference – organising information in space and time (“at a distance”), accelerating or delaying its delivery – appear contingent, unstable, or consistently irregular (Cubitt 194). Attributing actions to users, programmers, or the software itself is a difficult task when faced with these states of co-emergence, especially in the context of sharing knowledge and distributing media content. Exchanges between corporate entities, mainstream media, popular cultural producers, and legal institutions over P2P networks represent an ongoing controversy in this respect, with numerous stakeholders competing between investments in property, innovation, piracy, and publics. Beginning to understand this problematic landscape is an urgent task, especially in relation to the technological dynamics that organised and propel such antagonisms. In the influential fragment, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” Gilles Deleuze describes the historical passage from modern forms of organised enclosure (the prison, clinic, factory) to the contemporary arrangement of relational apparatuses and open systems as being materially provoked by – but not limited to – the mass deployment of networked digital technologies. In his analysis, the disciplinary mode most famously described by Foucault is spatially extended to informational systems based on code and flexibility. According to Deleuze, these cybernetic machines are connected into apparatuses that aim for intrusive monitoring: “in a control-based system nothing’s left alone for long” (“Control and Becoming” 175). Such a constant networking of behaviour is described as a shift from “molds” to “modulation,” where controls become “a self-transmuting molding changing from one moment to the next, or like a sieve whose mesh varies from one point to another” (“Postscript” 179). Accordingly, the crisis underpinning civil institutions is consistent with the generalisation of disciplinary logics across social space, forming an intensive modulation of everyday life, but one ambiguously associated with socio-technical ensembles. The precise dynamics of this epistemic shift are significant in terms of political agency: while control implies an arrangement capable of absorbing massive contingency, a series of complex instabilities actually mark its operation. Noise, viral contamination, and piracy are identified as key points of discontinuity; they appear as divisions or “errors” that force change by promoting indeterminacies in a system that would otherwise appear infinitely calculable, programmable, and predictable. The rendering of piracy as a tactic of resistance, a technique capable of levelling out the uneven economic field of global capitalism, has become a predictable catch-cry for political activists. In their analysis of multitude, for instance, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt describe the contradictions of post-Fordist production as conjuring forth a tendency for labour to “become common.” That is, as productivity depends on flexibility, communication, and cognitive skills, directed by the cultivation of an ideal entrepreneurial or flexible subject, the greater the possibilities for self-organised forms of living that significantly challenge its operation. In this case, intellectual property exemplifies such a spiralling paradoxical logic, since “the infinite reproducibility central to these immaterial forms of property directly undermines any such construction of scarcity” (Hardt and Negri 180). The implications of the filesharing program Napster, accordingly, are read as not merely directed toward theft, but in relation to the private character of the property itself; a kind of social piracy is perpetuated that is viewed as radically recomposing social resources and relations. Ravi Sundaram, a co-founder of the Sarai new media initiative in Delhi, has meanwhile drawn attention to the existence of “pirate modernities” capable of being actualised when individuals or local groups gain illegitimate access to distributive media technologies; these are worlds of “innovation and non-legality,” of electronic survival strategies that partake in cultures of dispersal and escape simple classification (94). Meanwhile, pirate entrepreneurs Magnus Eriksson and Rasmus Fleische – associated with the notorious Piratbyrn – have promoted the bleeding away of Hollywood profits through fully deployed P2P networks, with the intention of pushing filesharing dynamics to an extreme in order to radicalise the potential for social change (“Copies and Context”). From an aesthetic perspective, such activist theories are complemented by the affective register of appropriation art, a movement broadly conceived in terms of antagonistically liberating knowledge from the confines of intellectual property: “those who pirate and hijack owned material, attempting to free information, art, film, and music – the rhetoric of our cultural life – from what they see as the prison of private ownership” (Harold 114). These “unruly” escape attempts are pursued through various modes of engagement, from experimental performances with legislative infrastructures (i.e. Kembrew McLeod’s patenting of the phrase “freedom of expression”) to musical remix projects, such as the work of Negativland, John Oswald, RTMark, Detritus, Illegal Art, and the Evolution Control Committee. Amazon Noir, while similarly engaging with questions of ownership, is distinguished by specifically targeting information communication systems and finding “niches” or gaps between overlapping networks of control and economic governance. Hans Bernhard and Lizvlx from Ubermorgen.com (meaning ‘Day after Tomorrow,’ or ‘Super-Tomorrow’) actually describe their work as “research-based”: “we not are opportunistic, money-driven or success-driven, our central motivation is to gain as much information as possible as fast as possible as chaotic as possible and to redistribute this information via digital channels” (“Interview with Ubermorgen”). This has led to experiments like Google Will Eat Itself (2005) and the construction of the automated software thief against Amazon.com, as process-based explorations of technological action. Agency, Distribution Deleuze’s “postscript” on control has proven massively influential for new media art by introducing a series of key questions on power (or desire) and digital networks. As a social diagram, however, control should be understood as a partial rather than totalising map of relations, referring to the augmentation of disciplinary power in specific technological settings. While control is a conceptual regime that refers to open-ended terrains beyond the architectural locales of enclosure, implying a move toward informational networks, data solicitation, and cybernetic feedback, there remains a peculiar contingent dimension to its limits. For example, software code is typically designed to remain cycling until user input is provided. There is a specifically immanent and localised quality to its actions that might be taken as exemplary of control as a continuously modulating affective materialism. The outcome is a heightened sense of bounded emergencies that are either flattened out or absorbed through reconstitution; however, these are never linear gestures of containment. As Tiziana Terranova observes, control operates through multilayered mechanisms of order and organisation: “messy local assemblages and compositions, subjective and machinic, characterised by different types of psychic investments, that cannot be the subject of normative, pre-made political judgments, but which need to be thought anew again and again, each time, in specific dynamic compositions” (“Of Sense and Sensibility” 34). This event-orientated vitality accounts for the political ambitions of tactical media as opening out communication channels through selective “transversal” targeting. Amazon Noir, for that reason, is pitched specifically against the material processes of communication. The system used to harvest the content from “Search inside the Book” is described as “robot-perversion-technology,” based on a network of four servers around the globe, each with a specific function: one located in the United States that retrieved (or “sucked”) the books from the site, one in Russia that injected the assembled documents onto P2P networks and two in Europe that coordinated the action via intelligent automated programs (see “The Diagram”). According to the “villains,” the main goal was to steal all 150,000 books from Search Inside!™ then use the same technology to steal books from the “Google Print Service” (the exploit was limited only by the amount of technological resources financially available, but there are apparent plans to improve the technique by reinvesting the money received through the settlement with Amazon.com not to publicise the hack). In terms of informational culture, this system resembles a machinic process directed at redistributing copyright content; “The Diagram” visualises key processes that define digital piracy as an emergent phenomenon within an open-ended and responsive milieu. That is, the static image foregrounds something of the activity of copying being a technological action that complicates any analysis focusing purely on copyright as content. In this respect, intellectual property rights are revealed as being entangled within information architectures as communication management and cultural recombination – dissipated and enforced by a measured interplay between openness and obstruction, resonance and emergence (Terranova, “Communication beyond Meaning” 52). To understand data distribution requires an acknowledgement of these underlying nonhuman relations that allow for such informational exchanges. It requires an understanding of the permutations of agency carried along by digital entities. According to Lawrence Lessig’s influential argument, code is not merely an object of governance, but has an overt legislative function itself. Within the informational environments of software, “a law is defined, not through a statue, but through the code that governs the space” (20). These points of symmetry are understood as concretised social values: they are material standards that regulate flow. Similarly, Alexander Galloway describes computer protocols as non-institutional “etiquette for autonomous agents,” or “conventional rules that govern the set of possible behavior patterns within a heterogeneous system” (7). In his analysis, these agreed-upon standardised actions operate as a style of management fostered by contradiction: progressive though reactionary, encouraging diversity by striving for the universal, synonymous with possibility but completely predetermined, and so on (243-244). Needless to say, political uncertainties arise from a paradigm that generates internal material obscurities through a constant twinning of freedom and control. For Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, these Cold War systems subvert the possibilities for any actual experience of autonomy by generalising paranoia through constant intrusion and reducing social problems to questions of technological optimisation (1-30). In confrontation with these seemingly ubiquitous regulatory structures, cultural theory requires a critical vocabulary differentiated from computer engineering to account for the sociality that permeates through and concatenates technological realities. In his recent work on “mundane” devices, software and code, Adrian McKenzie introduces a relevant analytic approach in the concept of technological action as something that both abstracts and concretises relations in a diffusion of collective-individual forces. Drawing on the thought of French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, he uses the term “transduction” to identify a key characteristic of technology in the relational process of becoming, or ontogenesis. This is described as bringing together disparate things into composites of relations that evolve and propagate a structure throughout a domain, or “overflow existing modalities of perception and movement on many scales” (“Impersonal and Personal Forces in Technological Action” 201). Most importantly, these innovative diffusions or contagions occur by bridging states of difference or incompatibilities. Technological action, therefore, arises from a particular type of disjunctive relation between an entity and something external to itself: “in making this relation, technical action changes not only the ensemble, but also the form of life of its agent. Abstraction comes into being and begins to subsume or reconfigure existing relations between the inside and outside” (203). Here, reciprocal interactions between two states or dimensions actualise disparate potentials through metastability: an equilibrium that proliferates, unfolds, and drives individuation. While drawing on cybernetics and dealing with specific technological platforms, McKenzie’s work can be extended to describe the significance of informational devices throughout control societies as a whole, particularly as a predictive and future-orientated force that thrives on staged conflicts. Moreover, being a non-deterministic technical theory, it additionally speaks to new tendencies in regimes of production that harness cognition and cooperation through specially designed infrastructures to enact persistent innovation without any end-point, final goal or natural target (Thrift 283-295). Here, the interface between intellectual property and reproduction can be seen as a site of variation that weaves together disparate objects and entities by imbrication in social life itself. These are specific acts of interference that propel relations toward unforeseen conclusions by drawing on memories, attention spans, material-technical traits, and so on. The focus lies on performance, context, and design “as a continual process of tuning arrived at by distributed aspiration” (Thrift 295). This later point is demonstrated in recent scholarly treatments of filesharing networks as media ecologies. Kate Crawford, for instance, describes the movement of P2P as processual or adaptive, comparable to technological action, marked by key transitions from partially decentralised architectures such as Napster, to the fully distributed systems of Gnutella and seeded swarm-based networks like BitTorrent (30-39). Each of these technologies can be understood as a response to various legal incursions, producing radically dissimilar socio-technological dynamics and emergent trends for how agency is modulated by informational exchanges. Indeed, even these aberrant formations are characterised by modes of commodification that continually spillover and feedback on themselves, repositioning markets and commodities in doing so, from MP3s to iPods, P2P to broadband subscription rates. However, one key limitation of this ontological approach is apparent when dealing with the sheer scale of activity involved, where mass participation elicits certain degrees of obscurity and relative safety in numbers. This represents an obvious problem for analysis, as dynamics can easily be identified in the broadest conceptual sense, without any understanding of the specific contexts of usage, political impacts, and economic effects for participants in their everyday consumptive habits. Large-scale distributed ensembles are “problematic” in their technological constitution, as a result. They are sites of expansive overflow that provoke an equivalent individuation of thought, as the Recording Industry Association of America observes on their educational website: “because of the nature of the theft, the damage is not always easy to calculate but not hard to envision” (“Piracy”). The politics of the filesharing debate, in this sense, depends on the command of imaginaries; that is, being able to conceptualise an overarching structural consistency to a persistent and adaptive ecology. As a mode of tactical intervention, Amazon Noir dramatises these ambiguities by framing technological action through the fictional sensibilities of narrative genre. Ambiguity, Control The extensive use of imagery and iconography from “noir” can be understood as an explicit reference to the increasing criminalisation of copyright violation through digital technologies. However, the term also refers to the indistinct or uncertain effects produced by this tactical intervention: who are the “bad guys” or the “good guys”? Are positions like ‘good’ and ‘evil’ (something like freedom or tyranny) so easily identified and distinguished? As Paolo Cirio explains, this political disposition is deliberately kept obscure in the project: “it’s a representation of the actual ambiguity about copyright issues, where every case seems to lack a moral or ethical basis” (“Amazon Noir Interview”). While user communications made available on the site clearly identify culprits (describing the project as jeopardising arts funding, as both irresponsible and arrogant), the self-description of the artists as political “failures” highlights the uncertainty regarding the project’s qualities as a force of long-term social renewal: Lizvlx from Ubermorgen.com had daily shootouts with the global mass-media, Cirio continuously pushed the boundaries of copyright (books are just pixels on a screen or just ink on paper), Ludovico and Bernhard resisted kickback-bribes from powerful Amazon.com until they finally gave in and sold the technology for an undisclosed sum to Amazon. Betrayal, blasphemy and pessimism finally split the gang of bad guys. (“Press Release”) Here, the adaptive and flexible qualities of informatic commodities and computational systems of distribution are knowingly posited as critical limits; in a certain sense, the project fails technologically in order to succeed conceptually. From a cynical perspective, this might be interpreted as guaranteeing authenticity by insisting on the useless or non-instrumental quality of art. However, through this process, Amazon Noir illustrates how forces confined as exterior to control (virality, piracy, noncommunication) regularly operate as points of distinction to generate change and innovation. Just as hackers are legitimately employed to challenge the durability of network exchanges, malfunctions are relied upon as potential sources of future information. Indeed, the notion of demonstrating ‘autonomy’ by illustrating the shortcomings of software is entirely consistent with the logic of control as a modulating organisational diagram. These so-called “circuit breakers” are positioned as points of bifurcation that open up new systems and encompass a more general “abstract machine” or tendency governing contemporary capitalism (Parikka 300). As a consequence, the ambiguities of Amazon Noir emerge not just from the contrary articulation of intellectual property and digital technology, but additionally through the concept of thinking “resistance” simultaneously with regimes of control. This tension is apparent in Galloway’s analysis of the cybernetic machines that are synonymous with the operation of Deleuzian control societies – i.e. “computerised information management” – where tactical media are posited as potential modes of contestation against the tyranny of code, “able to exploit flaws in protocological and proprietary command and control, not to destroy technology, but to sculpt protocol and make it better suited to people’s real desires” (176). While pushing a system into a state of hypertrophy to reform digital architectures might represent a possible technique that produces a space through which to imagine something like “our” freedom, it still leaves unexamined the desire for reformation itself as nurtured by and produced through the coupling of cybernetics, information theory, and distributed networking. This draws into focus the significance of McKenzie’s Simondon-inspired cybernetic perspective on socio-technological ensembles as being always-already predetermined by and driven through asymmetries or difference. As Chun observes, consequently, there is no paradox between resistance and capture since “control and freedom are not opposites, but different sides of the same coin: just as discipline served as a grid on which liberty was established, control is the matrix that enables freedom as openness” (71). Why “openness” should be so readily equated with a state of being free represents a major unexamined presumption of digital culture, and leads to the associated predicament of attempting to think of how this freedom has become something one cannot not desire. If Amazon Noir has political currency in this context, however, it emerges from a capacity to recognise how informational networks channel desire, memories, and imaginative visions rather than just cultivated antagonisms and counterintuitive economics. As a final point, it is worth observing that the project was initiated without publicity until the settlement with Amazon.com. There is, as a consequence, nothing to suggest that this subversive “event” might have actually occurred, a feeling heightened by the abstractions of software entities. To the extent that we believe in “the big book heist,” that such an act is even possible, is a gauge through which the paranoia of control societies is illuminated as a longing or desire for autonomy. As Hakim Bey observes in his conceptualisation of “pirate utopias,” such fleeting encounters with the imaginaries of freedom flow back into the experience of the everyday as political instantiations of utopian hope. Amazon Noir, with all its underlying ethical ambiguities, presents us with a challenge to rethink these affective investments by considering our profound weaknesses to master the complexities and constant intrusions of control. It provides an opportunity to conceive of a future that begins with limits and limitations as immanently central, even foundational, to our deep interconnection with socio-technological ensembles. References “Amazon Noir – The Big Book Crime.” http://www.amazon-noir.com/>. Bey, Hakim. T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. New York: Autonomedia, 1991. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fibre Optics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Crawford, Kate. “Adaptation: Tracking the Ecologies of Music and Peer-to-Peer Networks.” Media International Australia 114 (2005): 30-39. Cubitt, Sean. “Distribution and Media Flows.” Cultural Politics 1.2 (2005): 193-214. Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. Seán Hand. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. ———. “Control and Becoming.” Negotiations 1972-1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. 169-176. ———. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” Negotiations 1972-1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. 177-182. Eriksson, Magnus, and Rasmus Fleische. “Copies and Context in the Age of Cultural Abundance.” Online posting. 5 June 2007. Nettime 25 Aug 2007. Galloway, Alexander. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Press, 2004. Harold, Christine. OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. Lessig, Lawrence. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. New York: Basic Books, 1999. McKenzie, Adrian. Cutting Code: Software and Sociality. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. ———. “The Strange Meshing of Impersonal and Personal Forces in Technological Action.” Culture, Theory and Critique 47.2 (2006): 197-212. Parikka, Jussi. “Contagion and Repetition: On the Viral Logic of Network Culture.” Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization 7.2 (2007): 287-308. “Piracy Online.” Recording Industry Association of America. 28 Aug 2007. http://www.riaa.com/physicalpiracy.php>. Sundaram, Ravi. “Recycling Modernity: Pirate Electronic Cultures in India.” Sarai Reader 2001: The Public Domain. Delhi, Sarai Media Lab, 2001. 93-99. http://www.sarai.net>. Terranova, Tiziana. “Communication beyond Meaning: On the Cultural Politics of Information.” Social Text 22.3 (2004): 51-73. ———. “Of Sense and Sensibility: Immaterial Labour in Open Systems.” DATA Browser 03 – Curating Immateriality: The Work of the Curator in the Age of Network Systems. Ed. Joasia Krysa. New York: Autonomedia, 2006. 27-38. Thrift, Nigel. “Re-inventing Invention: New Tendencies in Capitalist Commodification.” Economy and Society 35.2 (2006): 279-306. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Dieter, Michael. "Amazon Noir: Piracy, Distribution, Control." M/C Journal 10.5 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/07-dieter.php>. APA Style Dieter, M. (Oct. 2007) "Amazon Noir: Piracy, Distribution, Control," M/C Journal, 10(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/07-dieter.php>.

Introduction Darkness is often characterised as something that warrants heightened caution and scrutiny – signifying increased danger and risk. Within settler-colonial settings such as Australia, cautionary and negative connotations of darkness are projected upon Black people and their bodies, forming part of continuing colonial regimes of power (Moreton-Robinson). Negative stereotypes of “dark” continues to racialise all Indigenous peoples. In Australia, Indigenous peoples are both Indigenous and Black regardless of skin colour, and this plays out in a range of ways, some of which will be highlighted within this article. This article demonstrates that for Indigenous peoples, associations of fear and danger are built into the structural mechanisms that shape and maintain colonial understandings of Indigenous peoples and their bodies. It is this embodied form of darkness, and its negative connotations, and responses that we explore further. Figure 1: Megan Cope’s ‘I’m not afraid of the Dark’ t-shirt (Fredericks and Heemsbergen 2021) Responding to the anxieties and fears of settlers that often surround Indigenous peoples, Quandamooka artist and member of the art collective ProppaNow, Megan Cope, has produced a range of t-shirts, one of which declares “I’m not afraid of the Dark” (fig. 1). The wording ‘reflects White Australia’s fear of blackness’ (Dark + Dangerous). Exploring race relations through the theme of “darkness”, we begin by discussing how negative connotations of darkness are represented through everyday lexicons and how efforts to shift prejudicial and racist language are often met with defensiveness and resistance. We then consider how fears towards the dark translate into everyday practices, reinforced by media representations. The article considers how stereotype, conjecture, and prejudice is inflicted upon Indigenous people and reflects white settler fears and anxieties, rooting colonialism in everyday language, action, and norms. The Language of Fear Indigenous people and others with dark skin tones are often presented as having a proclivity towards threatening, aggressive, deceitful, and negative behaviours. This works to inform how Indigenous peoples are “known” and responded to by hegemonic (predominantly white) populations. Negative connotations of Indigenous people are a means of reinforcing and legitimising the falsity that European knowledge systems, norms, and social structures are superior whilst denying the contextual colonial circumstances that have led to white dominance. In Australia, such denial corresponds to the refusal to engage with the unceded sovereignty of Aboriginal peoples or acknowledge Indigenous resistance. Language is integral to the ways in which dominant populations come to “know” and present the so-called “Other”. Such language is reflected in digital media, which both produce and maintain white anxieties towards race and ethnicity. When part of mainstream vernacular, racialised language – and the value judgments associated with it – often remains in what Moreton-Robinson describes as “invisible regimes of power” (75). Everyday social structures, actions, and habits of thought veil oppressive and discriminatory attitudes that exist under the guise of “normality”. Colonisation and the dominance of Eurocentric ways of knowing, being, and doing has fixated itself on creating a normality that associates Indigeneity and darkness with negative and threatening connotations. In doing so, it reinforces power balances that presents an image of white superiority built on the invalidation of Indigeneity and Blackness. White fears and anxieties towards race made explicit through social and digital media are also manifest via subtle but equally pervasive everyday action (Carlson and Frazer; Matamoros-Fernández). Confronting and negotiating such fears becomes a daily reality for many Indigenous people. During the height of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in the United States, which extended to Australia and were linked to deaths in custody and police violence, African American poet Saul Williams reminded his followers of the power of language in constructing racialised fears (saulwilliams). In an Instagram post, Williams draws back the veil of an uncontested normality to ask that we take personal responsibility over the words we use. He writes: here’s a tip: Take the words DARK or BLACK in connection to bad, evil, ominous or scary events out of your vocabulary. We learn the stock market crashed on Black Monday, we read headlines that purport “Dark Days Ahead”. There’s “dark” or “black” humour which implies an undertone of evil, and then there are people like me who grow up with dark skin having to make sense of the English/American lexicon and its history of “fair complexions” – where “fair” can mean “light; blond.” OR “in accordance with rules or standards; legitimate.” We may not be fully responsible for the duplicitous evolution of language and subtle morphing of inherited beliefs into description yet we are in full command of the words we choose even as they reveal the questions we’ve left unasked. Like the work of Moreton-Robinson and other scholars, Williams implores his followers to take a reflexive position to consider the questions often left unasked. In doing so, he calls for the transcendence of anonymity and engagement with the realities of colonisation – no matter how ugly, confronting, and complicit one may be in its continuation. In the Australian context this means confronting how terms such as “dark”, “darkie”, or “darky” were historically used as derogatory and offensive slurs for Aboriginal peoples. Such language continues to be used today and can be found in the comment sections of social media, online news platforms, and other online forums (Carlson “Love and Hate”). Taking the move to execute personal accountability can be difficult. It can destabilise and reframe the ways in which we understand and interact with the world (Rose 22). For some, however, exposing racism and seemingly mundane aspects of society is taken as a personal attack which is often met with reactionary responses where one remains closed to new insights (Whittaker). This feeds into fears and anxieties pertaining to the perceived loss of power. These fears and anxieties continue to surface through conversations and calls for action on issues such as changing the date of Australia Day, the racialised reporting of news (McQuire), removing of plaques and statues known to be racist, and requests to change placenames and the names of products. For example, in 2020, Australian cheese producer Saputo Dairy Australia changed the name of it is popular brand “Coon” to “Cheer Tasty”. The decision followed a lengthy campaign led by Dr Stephen Hagan who called for the rebranding based on the Coon brand having racist connotations (ABC). The term has its racist origins in the United States and has long been used as a slur against people with dark skin, liking them to racoons and their tendency to steal and deceive. The term “Coon” is used in Australia by settlers as a racist term for referring to Aboriginal peoples. Claims that the name change is example of political correctness gone astray fail to acknowledge and empathise with the lived experience of being treated as if one is dirty, lazy, deceitful, or untrustworthy. Other brand names have also historically utilised racist wording along with imagery in their advertising (Conor). Pear’s soap for example is well-known for its historical use of racist words and imagery to legitimise white rule over Indigenous colonies, including in Australia (Jackson). Like most racial epithets, the power of language lies in how the words reflect and translate into actions that dehumanise others. The words we use matter. The everyday “ordinary” world, including online, is deeply politicised (Carlson and Frazer “They Got Filters”) and comes to reflect attitudes and power imbalances that encourage white people to internalise the falsity that they are superior and should have control over Black people (Conor). Decisions to make social change, such as that made by Saputo Dairy Australia, can manifest into further white anxieties via their ability to force the confrontation of the circumstances that continue to contribute to one’s own prosperity. In other words, to unveil the realities of colonialism and ask the questions that are too often left in the dark. Lived Experiences of Darkness Colonial anxieties and fears are driven by the fact that Black populations in many areas of the world are often characterised as criminals, perpetrators, threats, or nuisances, but are rarely seen as victims. In Australia, the repeated lack of police response and receptivity to concerns of Indigenous peoples expressed during the Black Lives Matter campaign saw tens of thousands of people take to the streets to protest. Protestors at the same time called for the end of police brutality towards Indigenous peoples and for an end to Indigenous deaths in custody. The protests were backed by a heavy online presence that sought to mobilise people in hope of lifting the veil that shrouds issues relating to systemic racism. There have been over 450 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to die in custody since the end of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1991 (The Guardian). The tragedy of the Indigenous experience gains little attention internationally. The negative implications of being the object of white fear and anxiety are felt by Indigenous and other Black communities daily. The “safety signals” (Daniella Emanuel) adopted by white peoples in response to often irrational perceptions of threat signify how Indigenous and other Black peoples and communities are seen and valued by the hegemony. Memes played out in social media depicting “Karens” – a term that corresponds to caricaturised white women (but equally applicable to men) who exhibit behaviours of entitlement – have increasing been used in media to expose the prevalence of irrational racial fears (also see Wong). Police are commonly called on Indigenous people and other Black people for simply being within spaces such as shopping malls, street corners, parks, or other spaces in which they are considered not to belong (Mohdin). Digital media are also commonly envisioned as a space that is not natural or normal for Indigenous peoples, a notion that maintains narratives of so-called Indigenous primitivity (Carlson and Frazer). Media connotations of darkness as threatening are associated with, and strategically manipulated by, the images that accompany stories about Indigenous peoples and other Black peoples. Digital technologies play significant roles in producing and disseminating the images shown in the media. Moreover, they have a “role in mediating and amplifying old and new forms of abuse, hate, and discrimination” (Matamoros-Fernández and Farkas). Daniels demonstrates how social media sites can be spaces “where race and racism play out in interesting, sometimes disturbing, ways” (702), shaping ongoing colonial fears and anxieties over Black peoples. Prominent footballer Adam Goodes, for example, faced a string of attacks after he publicly condemned racism when he was called an “Ape” by a spectator during a game celebrating Indigenous contributions to the sport (Coram and Hallinan). This was followed by a barrage of personal attacks, criticisms, and booing that spread over the remaining years of his football career. When Goodes performed a traditional war dance as a form of celebration during a game in 2015, many turned to social media to express their outrage over his “confrontational” and “aggressive” behaviour (Robinson). Goodes’s affirmation of his Indigeneity was seen by many as a threat to their own positionality and white sensibility. Social media were therefore used as a mechanism to control settler narratives and maintain colonial power structures by framing the conversation through a white lens (Carlson and Frazer “They Got Filters”). Indigenous peoples in other highly visible fields have faced similar backlash. In 1993, Elaine George was the first Aboriginal person to feature on the cover of Vogue magazine, a decision considered “risky” at the time (Singer). The editor of Vogue later revealed that the cover was criticised by some who believed George’s skin tone was made to appear lighter than it actually was and that it had been digitally altered. The failure to accept a lighter skin colour as “Aboriginal” exposes a neglect to accept ethnicity and Blackness in all its diversity (Carlson and Frazer “They Got Filters”; Carlson “Love and Hate”). Where Adam Goodes was criticised for his overt expression of Blackness, George was critisised for not being “black enough”. It was not until seventeen years later that another Aboriginal model, Samantha Harris, was featured on the cover of Vogue (Marks). While George inspired and pathed the way for those to come, Harris experienced similar discrimination within the industry and amongst the public (Carson and Ky). Singer Jessica Mauboy (in Hornery) also explains how her identity was managed by others. She recalls, I was pretty young when I first received recognition, and for years I felt as though I couldn't show my true identity. What I was saying in public was very dictated by other people who could not handle my sense of culture and identity. They felt they had to take it off my hands. Mauboy’s experience not only demonstrates how Blackness continues to be seen as something to “handle”, but also how power imbalances play out. Scholar Chelsea Watego offers numerous examples of how this occurs in different ways and arenas, for example through relationships between people and within workplaces. Bargallie’s scholarly work also provides an understanding of how Indigenous people experience racism within the Australian public service, and how it is maintained through the structures and systems of power. The media often represents communities with large Indigenous populations as being separatist and not contributing to wider society and problematic (McQuire). Violence, and the threat of violence, is often presented in media as being normalised. Recently there have been calls for an increased police presence in Alice Springs, NT, and other remotes communities due to ongoing threats of “tribal payback” and acts of “lawlessness” (Sky News Australia; Hildebrand). Goldberg uses the phrase “Super/Vision” to describe the ways that Black men and women in Black neighbourhoods are continuously and erroneously supervised and surveilled by police using apparatus such as helicopters and floodlights. Simone Browne demonstrates how contemporary surveillance practices are rooted in anti-black domination and are operationalised through a white gaze. Browne uses the term “racializing surveillance” to describe a ”technology of social control where surveillance practices, policies, and performances concern the production of norms pertaining to race and exercise a ‘power to define what is in or out of place’” (16). The outcome is often discriminatory treatment to those negatively racialised by such surveillance. Narratives that associate Indigenous peoples with darkness and danger fuel colonial fears and uphold the invisible regimes of power by instilling the perception that acts of surveillance and the restrictions imposed on Indigenous peoples’ autonomy are not only necessary but justified. Such myths fail to contextualise the historic colonial factors that drive segregation and enable a forgetting that negates personal accountability and complicity in maintaining colonial power imbalances (Riggs and Augoustinos). Inayatullah and Blaney (165) write that the “myth we construct calls attention to a darker, tragic side of our ethical engagement: the role of colonialism in constituting us as modern actors.” They call for personal accountability whereby one confronts the notion that we are both products and producers of a modernity rooted in a colonialism that maintains the misguided notion of white supremacy (Wolfe; Mignolo; Moreton-Robinson). When Indigenous and other Black peoples enter spaces that white populations don’t traditionally associate as being “natural” or “fitting” for them (whether residential, social, educational, a workplace, online, or otherwise), alienation, discrimination, and criminalisation often occurs (Bargallie; Mohdin; Linhares). Structural barriers are erected, prohibiting career or social advancement while making the space feel unwelcoming (Fredericks; Bargallie). In workplaces, Indigenous employees become the subject of hyper-surveillance through the supervision process (Bargallie), continuing to make them difficult work environments. This is despite businesses and organisations seeking to increase their Indigenous staff numbers, expressing their need to change, and implementing cultural competency training (Fredericks and Bargallie). As Barnwell correctly highlights, confronting white fears and anxieties must be the responsibility of white peoples. When feelings of shock or discomfort arise when in the company of Indigenous peoples, one must reflexively engage with the reasons behind this “fear of the dark” and consider that perhaps it is they who are self-segregating. Mohdin suggests that spaces highly populated by Black peoples are best thought of not as “black spaces” or “black communities”, but rather spaces where white peoples do not want to be. They stand as reminders of a failed colonial regime that sought to deny and dehumanise Indigenous peoples and cultures, as well as the continuation of Black resistance and sovereignty. Conclusion In working towards improving relationships between Black and white populations, the truths of colonisation, and its continuing pervasiveness in local and global settings must first be confronted. In this article we have discussed the association of darkness with instinctual fears and negative responses to the unknown. White populations need to reflexively engage and critique how they think, act, present, address racism, and respond to Indigenous peoples (Bargallie; Moreton-Robinson; Whittaker), cultivating a “decolonising consciousness” (Bradfield) to develop new habits of thinking and relating. To overcome fears of the dark, we must confront that which remains unknown, and the questions left unasked. This means exposing racism and power imbalances, developing meaningful relationships with Indigenous peoples, addressing structural change, and implementing alternative ways of knowing and doing. Only then may we begin to embody Megan Cope’s message, “I’m not afraid of the Dark”. Acknowledgements We thank Dr Debbie Bargallie for her feedback on our article, which strengthened the work. References ABC News. 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