Journal articles on the topic 'Real property and taxation – New York (State) – New York'

This article considers the initiation history of the compound of the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia in Pine Bush, New York State (USA). The materials of the R-6991 foundation (the Foundation of the Council for Religious Affairs attached to the Council of Ministers of the USSR), of the State Archives of the Russian Federation, as well as the Archives of the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate were used as sources of the research base. The documents identified and introduced into scientific circulation for the first time made it possible to find out the reasons for the purchase of the real estate and to disclose the plans for its development among the leadership of the American Exarchate. The main factor that caused the purchase was a difficult financial situation of the Patriarchal parishes in the USA. The initiators of the purchase hoped to develop the commercial potential of the property and create an additional source of Exarchate income from it. The archival documents indicate the sale of part of the Patriarchal Estate land for residential development and for a cemetery, and at the same time there were attempts to establish a children’s camp and a private nursing home on its territory. In addition, the complex of sources made it possible to identify the hitherto unknown stages and details of the construction of the Church in Honor of All the Saints in the Land of Russia Shining – the church located within the boundaries of the courtyard. It was determined that the construction of the church began in November 1963, and in 1969 the building had been completely built. At the same time, the article answers the question why the Pine Bush estate became the subject of discussion during the negotiations between the Moscow Patriarchate and the American Metropolitanate.

Goldman, Mara J. 2020. Narrating Nature. Wildlife Conservation and Maasai Ways of Knowing. Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press. 304 pp. Ebook: US$60.00. ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-4194-2. Winchell, Mareike. 2022. After Servitude: Elusive Property and the Ethics of Kinship in Bolivia. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. 352 pp. Pb.: US$29.95. ISBN: 9780520386440. Barua, Maan. 2023. Lively Cities. Reconfiguring Urban Ecology. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press. 382 pp. Pb.: US$30.00. ISBN: 978-1-5179-1256-7. Stafford, Charles. 2020. Economic Life in the Real World: Logic, Emotion and Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 196 pp. Pb. £22.99. ISBN: 978-1-108-71655-0. Świtek, Beata. 2021. Reluctant Intimacies: Japanese Eldercare in Indonesian Hands. New York: Berghahn. 242 pp. Pb.: US$34.95. ISBN: 978-1-80073-016-8. Bubandt, Nils, Astrid Oberborbeck Andersen and Rachel Cypher (eds.). 2022. Rubber Boots Methods for the Anthropocene. Doing Fieldwork in Multispecies Worlds. 432 pp. Pb.: US$34.95. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN: 978-1-5179-1165-2. Dewan, Camelia. 2021. Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change, Development, and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. 224 pp. Pb.: US$32.00. ISBN: 978-0-295-74961-7. Adams, Vincanne. 2023. Glyphosate & the Swirl: An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 184 pp. Pb.: US$24.95. ISBN: 978-1-4780-1675-5. Kravel-Tovi, Michal. 2017. When the State Winks: The Performance of Jewish Conversion in Israel. New York: Columbia University Press. 320 pp. Hb.: US$75.00. ISBN: 9780231183246.

Product development is a multi-faceted role that a growing number of engineers are tasked with. This represents a significant shift in career paths for those employed in the chemical and materials engineering disciplines, who typically were concerned with bulk commodity manufacturing. This paradigm shift requires the undergraduate curriculum to be adapted to prepare students for these new responsibilities. The authors present here on a product design capstone course developed for chemical engineering seniors at the University at Buffalo (UB), The State University of New York (SUNY). The course encompasses the following themes: a general framework for product design and development (identify customer needs, convert needs to specifications, create ideas/concepts, select concept, formulate/test/manufacture product; and (nano)structure-property relations that guide the search for smart/tunable/functional materials for contemporary needs and challenges. These two main themes are enriched with case studies of successful products. Students put the course material into practice by working through formulated product design projects that are drawn from real-world problems. The authors begin by presenting the course organization, teaching techniques, and assessment strategy. They then discuss examples of student work to show how students apply the course material to solve problems. Finally, they present an analysis of historical student performance in the course. The analysis seeks to identify correlation between related student deliverables, and also between the Product Design course and a prerequisite materials science and engineering course.

The paper is aimed at estimation of indirect economic losses resulting from natural disasters. Generally, these losses are defined as interruptions in economic activities and are not related to the damaged enterprises. Even limited physical damage to property and infrastructure caused by natural disaster can produce chain reaction of losses in supply chain within a certain region. The Space Syntax Methodology is developed and used for accessing the characteristics of buildings, cities or the surrounding space in general. Although the methodology was primarily developed as urban planning method, it was also applied in the field of social and economic networks. Various studies of poverty, crime, disaster management and real estate prices are based on this methodology. The economic activities within a specific area are in a state of equilibrium before a disastrous event occurs. The disaster will change the spatial configuration (streets, buildings and infrastructure) causing negative effect on the economic networks and business opportunities. The main assumption of the research is that potential indirect losses could be estimated by comparing the Space Syntax characteristics before and after a disastrous event by measuring the deterioration of links between economic enterprises. The methodology is applied in a practical study of urban area. OpenStreetMap data is used as road-centred map of the city of York. The Historical Flood Map of the UK Environment Agency is used to setup disaster event impact. The Angular Segment Analysis implemented in DepthmapX software is used as the main method for analysis. The study of applicable network measures shows that Normalised Angular Choice can be used as criteria for selecting alternatives for minimizing indirect costs caused by road network damages. At the same time, this methodology cannot be used for monetizing indirect costs or identifying losses in different economic sectors. The study approach does not contradict the main theoretical approaches and it gives new opportunities for research on disasters recovery.

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Pengaruh Pengetahuan Perpajakan Dan Modernisasi Sistem Administrasi Perpajakan Terhadap Kepatuhan Wajib Pajak (Studi Kasus Pada Wajib Pajak Badan Di Kpp Pratama Sidoarjo Selatan) (Doctoral Dissertation, Stie Mahardhika Surabaya). Edward I. Altman. (1968). Financial Ratios, Discriminant Analysis and the Prediction of Corporate Bankruptcy. The Journal of Finance, 23(4), 589–609. Elizabeth C. A (2020) Pribadi, Kepatuhan Wajib Pajak Orang. "Pengaruh Modernisasi Sistem Administrasi Perpajakan Dan Pengetahuan Perpajakan Terhadap." Fajriyah, Nurul. (2020). Pengaruh Pengetahuan Perpajakan, Modernisasi Sistem Administrasi Perpajakan Dan Kesadaran Wajib Pajak Terhadap Kepatuhan Wajib Pajak Orang Pribadi. Diss. Universitas Komputer Indonesia,. Ferdian, T (2020). Pajak Kuat Indonesia Maju. https://www.pajak.go.id/id/artikel/perlu-diketahui-ini-penyebab-timbulnya-utang-pajak Gantino.R (2018). 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Peran Sistem Informasi Manajemen Di Dalam Mengendalikan Operasional Badan Usaha Milik Daerah. Insight Management Journal, 1 (2). 55-67. Hery. (2018). Analisis Laporan Keuangan (Integrated and Comprehensive Edition) (Ketiga; Adi Pramono, Ed.). Jakarta: PT Raja Grafindo Persada. Ihyaul Ulum. (2015). Intellectual Capital Konsep dan Kajian Teoris. Yogyakarta: Graha Ilmu Jogiyanto Hartono. (2017). Teori Portofolio dan Analisis Investasi (Kesebelas). Yogyakarta: BPFE. Irham Fahmi. (2014). Manajemen Keuangan Perusahaan dan Pasar Modal. Jakarta: Mitra Wacana Media. Istanto, Feri. (2010). ”Analisis Pengaruh Pengetahuan Tentang Pajak, Kualitas Pelayanan Pajak, Ketegasan Sanksi Perpajakan Dan Tingkat Pendidikan Terhadap Motivasi Wajib Pajak Dalam Membayar Pajak”.Skripsi UIN,Jakarta. Kasmir. (2016). Analisis Laporan Keuangan. Jakarta: PT Raja Grafindo Persada. 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Rampersad, Hubert K. (2005), Total Performance Scorecard, Konsep Manajemen Baru Mencapai Kinerja dengan integritas, Alih Bahasa Edy Sukarno dan Djemanu, Gramedia Pustaka Utama, Jakart Riduansyah, Muhammad (2003), „Kontribusi Pajak Daerah dan Retribusi Daerah Terhadap Pendapatan Asli Daerah (PAD) dan Anggaran Pendapatan dan Belanja Daerah (APBD’), Indosnesia, Jakarta Saragih, Juli Panglima. (2003). Desentralisasi Fiskal dan Keuangan Daerah Dalam Otonomi. Ghalia Indonesia, Jakarta Nurcahyanti, W. (2015). Studi komparatif model Z-Score Altman, Springate dan Zmijewski dalam mengindikasikan kebangkrutan perusahaan yang terdaftar di BEI. Jurnal Akuntansi, 3(1), 1–21. Nafisatin, M. (2014). Implementasi Penggunaan Metode Altman (Z-Score) Untuk Menganalisis Estimasi Kebangkrutan (Studi Pada PT Bursa Efek Indonesia Periode 2011-2013). Jurnal Administrasi Bisnis, 10(1), 1-8. Octama, M. I. (2013). Analisis Faktor-Faktor Penentu Pengungkapan Modal Intelektual dan Pengaruhnya Terhadap Harga Saham. 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A new fluorimetric and colorimetric dual-mode probe, 4-bromo-2-(hydrazonomethyl) phenol (BHP) has been synthesized and successfully utilized for the recognition of Cd2+/F‒ ions in DMSO/H2O (9:1, v/v) system. The probe displays dual channel of detection via fluorescence enhancement and colorimetric changes upon binding with F‒ and Cd2+ ions respectively. The Job’s plot analysis, ESI-MS studies, Density Functional Theoretical (DFT) calculations, 1H NMR and 19F NMR titration results were confirmed and highly supported the 1:1 binding stoichiometry of the probe was complexed with Cd2+/F‒ ions. Furthermore, intracellular detection of F‒ ions in HeLa cells and fluorescence imaging analysis in Zebrafish embryos results of the probe BHP might be used to reveal their potential applications in a biological living system. Introduction The quantification and detection of toxic metal ions in diverse fields have fascinated more attention in recent years due to their prominent and significant roles in clinical diagnosis and ecological system.1–6 Besides metal ions, anions also play an exclusive role in a variety of chemical and biological processes.7–12 In earlier, analytical methods for the detection of cations/anions has required highly sophisticated and expensive instruments such as atomic absorption spectrometry, inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry, ion sensitive electrodes, and gas and ion chromatography. Amid, fluorescent techniques have more expedient in terms of rapidness, excellent sensitivity and selectivity, low cost, easy and feasible detection. In addition, optical detection mode analysis is a more appropriate method because of their potential features such as easy handling, real-time analysis and different signal output modes.13–16 Besides, colorimetric assays are more feasible and potent tool as they provide a simple visible authentication for analyte detection in the absence of instruments and tedious techniques. In this perspective, the recent research area has been mainly focused to design the novel multi-functional fluorometric and colorimetric sensors for the detection of ions in the different environments. Cadmium (Cd2+) is one of the important hazardous heavy transition metal ions17 in the environment due its carcinogenic nature. The higher accumulation of Cd2+ ion and inhalation of Cd-dust prompts more awful health issues in human like cancer, cardiovascular diseases, kidneys and liver damage.18 Furthermore, the Cd2+ ion has more advantages in several industries such as pigments in plastics, electroplating and batteries, etc. On the other hand, fluoride ions play an ample role in dental health and in the treatment of osteoporosis.19–22 The excess of fluoride ingestion prompted severe disease in human health like gastric and kidney problems.23 In some remote areas, the high level contamination of fluoride ions in drinking water triggered bone disease such as fluorosis.24–31 Thus, to develop and synthesize novel multifunctional probe for the detection and quantification of both cations and anions is a highly anticipated and imperative task. Scheme 1. Synthesis of probe BHP Herein, we have fabricated and synthesized a novel chromogenic and fluorogenic assay based on bromo substituted salicylhydrazone moiety for the colorimetric and fluorometric detection of F‒ ions and colorimetric detection of Cd2+ ions in DMSO/H2O (9:1, v/v) system. The UV-visible and fluorescence spectral analysis of BHP with Cd2+/F‒ ions exposed an outstanding ratiometric absorbance and colorimetric responses towards F‒ ions and also showed a visible colorimetric response towards Cd2+ ions. The fluorescence enhancement of BHP with F‒ ion was highly evaluated by DFT calculations. As well, the cell viability experimental results of BHP can be used for the detection of F‒ ions in both HeLa cells and Zebrafish embryos via high content analysis system. Experimental Methods 2.1 Materials All the chemicals used in the present study were in the analytical reagent grade and solvents used were of HPLC grade. Reagents were used as such received without any further purification. Metal ions such as K+, Na+, Ca2+, Mg2+, Fe2+, Fe3+, Ag+, Zn2+, Mn2+, Cu2+, Co2+, Ni2+, Cd2+, Al3+, Cr3+, Pb2+ and Hg2+ were purchased from Merck and S.D. Fine chemicals. The anions of Cl-, Br-, I-, SCN-, CN-, H2PO4-, HSO4-, NO3-, AcO- and F- were purchased as their tetrabutylammonium salts from Sigma–Aldrich Pvt. Ltd. Absorption measurements were performed on JASCO V-630 spectrophotometer in 1 cm path length quartz cuvette with a volume of 2 mL at room temperature. Fluorescence measurements were made on a JASCO and F- 4500 Hitachi Spectrofluorimeter with excitation slit set at 5.0 nm band pass and emission at 5.0 nm band pass in 1 cm ×1 cm quartz cell. 1H and 13C NMR spectra were obtained on a Bruker 300 MHz NMR instrument with TMS as internal reference using DMSO-d6 as solvent. Standard Bruker software was used throughout. 19F NMR spectra were recorded at 293K on BRUKER 400 MHz FT-NMR spectrometers using DMSO-d6 as solvent. ElectroSpray Ionisation Mass Spectrometry (ESI-MS) analysis was performed in the positive/negative ion mode on a liquid chromatography-ion trap mass spectrometer (LCQ Fleet, Thermo Fisher Instruments Limited, US). Fluorescence microscopic imaging measurements were determined using Operetta High Content Imaging System (PerkinElmer, US) 2.2. Synthesis of (E)-4-bromo-2-(hydrazonomethyl) phenol, BHP An absolute alcoholic solution (50 ml) of 5-bromosalicylaldehyde (0.5gm, 2.49 mmol) was refluxed under hydrazine hydrate (in excess) for 5 hr and the pale yellow color solid product was collected after recrystallized with ethanol and ethyl acetate mixture (yield, 95 %). 1H NMR (300 MHz, DMSO-d6) δ (ppm): 8.92 (s, 1H), 11.89 (s, 1H), 7.53 (d, J = 8.7 Hz, 1H), 6.94 (d, J = 5.8 Hz, 1H); 13C NMR (75 MHz, DMSO-d6) δ (ppm): 161.36, 158.51, 135.84, 131.82, 120.86, 119.69, 106.72. 2.3 Photophysical analysis of BHP The optical mode analysis of BHP towards various cations/anions in DMSO/H2O (9:1, v/v) system was carried out by using absorbance and fluorescence spectroscopy. UV-visible and fluorescence analysis of BHP with cations were gauged by using their corresponding acetate salts of metal ions. Tetrabutylammonium salts of competing anions were used for the anionic sensing analysis. 2.4 Computational Studies The optimized geometrical and ground state energy level calculations of BHP were obtained by Density functional theoretical (DFT) calculations were executed using Gaussian 09 program 32 with the 6-311G basis set. The optimized geometries and the fluorescence enhancement of probe BHP complexed with Cd2+/F- ions were attained by DFT-B3LYP level theory using 6-311G and LANL2DZ basis sets. 2.5 Cytotoxicity studies HeLa cell lines were procured from the National Center for Cell Science (NCCS), Pune, India. Cell lines are kept in the Dulbecco's Modified Eagle's medium (DMEM) supplemented with 10% fetal bovine serum (FBS), 1% antimycotic and antibiotic solution was used in this study. The cells were kept in an incubator at 25 °C with humidified atmosphere comprising 5% of CO2 and 95% of air. HeLa cells were loaded over the wells of 96 well-culture plates with a density of 1 x 104 cells/well. After 48 h of incubation, previous DMEM medium was exchanged with new medium and BHP (dissolved in DMSO) was added in the range of 0-200 µM to all the wells and further incubated over 3h. Cytotoxicity of BHP was measured by using MTT [3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide] assay. After incubation of HeLa cells with BHP, the medium was detached. Further, 100 μl of DMSO was added and the resulting formazan crystals were dissolved in DMSO. The cell viability was determined by measuring the absorbance of each well at 540-660 nm (formation of formazan) using a microplate reader. 2.6 In vivo fluorescence analysis in Zebrafish embryos The fluorescence imaging analysis was performed in four days old embryos. The embryos were seeded over F- ion alone for 2 h in the E3 medium. The E3 medium was prepared by dissolving 5.0 mM NaCl, 0.17mM KCl, 0.33mM CaCl2, 0.33mM MgSO4 ingredients in H2O (2L) and the pH 7.2 was adjusted by adding NaOH. The embryos were thoroughly washed with E3 medium. Successively, incubated embryos were sowed over 25 mM of BHP (in DMSO) solution for 3h. Further, embryos were washed again with E3 medium and fixed in 10% methyl cellulose solution for the good oriented images. The fluorescent images of BHP-F- were logged using high content screening microscopy. (Excitation wavelength of 482 nm and emission wavelength range of 500-700 nm). Results and discussion The probe, (E)-4-bromo-2-(hydrazonomethyl) phenol (BHP) has been synthesized by one step condensation between hydrazine and 5-bromosalicylaldehyde in ethanol (yield, 95 %) as shown in Scheme 1. The structure of the probe BHP was confirmed via 1H, 13C NMR analysis (Figure S1-S2, See ESI) 3.1. UV–vis spectral analysis of cations with BHP To investigate the cation sensing events of BHP towards different cations in DMSO/H2O (9:1, v/v) system by using UV-vis and fluorescence titration experiments. Initially, free probe BHP exhibited an absorption band at 367 nm and further addition of mono, di and trivalent cations such as Li+, K+, Ag+, Mn2+, Co2+, Ni2+, Cu2+, Zn2+, Fe2+, Hg2+, Na+, Mg2+, Ca2+, Pb2+, Fe3+ and Cr3+ exhibited tiny changes in absorption spectr due to their weak interaction towards BHP except Cd2+ ion as shown in Figure 1. Interestingly, upon titrated with Cd2+ ion, a new absorption band appeared at 470 nm due to the highly resonance induced charge transfer ability of bromo substituted salicyl moiety while the solution turns into dark yellow color from pale yellow. Increasing addition of Cd2+ ion results gradual reduction of both higher and lower energy bands at 367 nm and 470 nm respectively as depicted in Figure 2. Figure 1. UV-vis spectra of BHP (10 µM) with different cations (5 × 10-3 M) in DMSO/H2O (9: 1, v/v) system. Figure 2. UV-vis spectra of BHP (10 µM) with Cd2+ (0 – 100 µM) in DMSO/H2O (9: 1, v/v) system Besides, fluorescence response of probe BHP towards various cations such as Li+, K+, Ag+, Mn2+, Co2+, Ni2+, Cu2+, Zn2+, Fe2+, Hg2+, Na+, Mg2+, Ca2+, Pb2+, Fe3+ and Cr3+ including Cd2+ ion have been inspected in DMSO/H2O (9:1, v/v) system. Initially, the probe BHP displayed low intensed fluorescence band in free state. Addition of other commonly coexistent metal ions including Cd2+ ions exhibited trivial changes in fluorescence spectra. From these results, it is concluded that the probe BHP could serve as an excellent colorimetric assay for the detection of Cd2+ ions. 3.2. The sensing analysis of BHP towards anions Moreover, the anion binding attraction of BHP towards anions have been investigated in DMSO/H2O (9:1, v/v) system via both UV-visible and fluorescence spectral techniques. Initially the probe BHP showed the absorption band at 367 nm. Upon titrated with other anions such as Cl‒, Br‒, I‒, NO3‒, AcO‒, HSO4‒, H2PO4‒ and CN‒ were failed to alter the absorbance of the probe BHP except F‒ ions as shown in Figure 3a. Moreover, the incremental addition of F‒ ions (0-50 µM), the higher energy band at 367 nm was decreased along with the increment in new absorption band at 482 nm results an excellent ratiometric response. The new low energy band observed at 482 nm due to the deprotonation of–OH group present in salicyl moiety initiated by hydrogen bonding [Figure 3b]. At that affair, the solution turns into orange color from pale yellow and it was simply discerned by naked eye [Figure 4]. Besides, under identical condition, the fluorescence titration experiment of BHP was carried out in the presence of different anions. Interestingly, the probe BHP displayed low intensed fluorescence band at 601 nm and the other competing anions were failed to affect the fluorescence intensity except F‒ ions as shown in [Figure 5a]. Further, the incremental addition of F‒ ions triggers the enhancement in intensity results an excellent “turn on” fluorescence response due to the deprotonation and the inhibition of charge transfer state stimulated by resonance around the moiety [Figure 5b]. 3.3. Competitive experiments To gauge the selectivity and recognizing ability of BHP, competitive analysis was performed in the presence of varying concentration of F‒ ion (0-50 µM). Initially, the probe was treated with 5 × 10-3 M of different anions such as, CN-, I-, Br-, Cl-, NO2-, CH3COO-, H2PO4- and HSO4-. The other common competing anions were failed to bind with the probe BHP except F- ion [Figure 6 (a) and (b)]. From these observations, it is ensured that BHP could act as an excellent selective and sensitve chromogenic receptor for F- ions in real time monitoring and different biological applications. Figure 3 (a): UV-vis spectra of BHP with 5 × 10-3 M of other anions in DMSO/H2O (9: 1 v/v) system. (b) UV-visible spectra of BHP (5 µM) with F‒ (0-50 µM) in DMSO/H2O (9: 1 v/v) system. Figure 4. Naked eye detection of F‒ ions with BHP under visible light (top) and UV-lamp (bottom) and BHP with Cd2+ visible light only (bottom). Figure 5 (a): Fluorescence spectra of BHP (5µM) with 5 × 10-3 M of other anions in DMSO/H2O (9: 1, v/v) system. Excitation at 482 nm. Slit width is 5 nm. (b) Fluorescence spectra of BHP (5µM) with F‒ (0-50 µM) in DMSO/H2O (9: 1, v/v) system. Excitation at 482 nm. Slit width is 5 nm. Figure 6 (a): Selectivity analysis of F‒ ion with BHP in the presence of competing anions. Excitation at 480 nm, Slit width = 5 nm. (b) The blue bars represent the change of the fluorescence intensity of BHP with the consequent addition of other anions. The pink bars represent the addition of the competing anions to BHP. Excitation at 480 nm, Slit width = 5 nm. 3.4. Job’s plot analysis and calculation of binding constant of BHP for Cd2+/F‒ ions Furthermore, the Job’s plot [Figure 7(a) and (b)] analysis based on UV-visible and fluorescence titration experiments results confirmed the 1:1 binding stoichiometry of BHP with both Cd2+/F‒ ions respectively. To further support the binding stoichiometry of BHP with Cd2+/F‒ions, ESI-MS spectral analysis were performed. The ESI-MS spectral analysis of BHP-Cd2+/BHP-F‒ disclosed peaks at 327.45/258.28 corresponds to [BHP+Cd2++Na+]/[BHP+F‒+H++Na+] respectively (Figure S3-S4, See ESI). Furthermore, the 1:1 binding stoichiometry of BHP with F− ions was confirmed via 1H NMR titration profile (Figure 8) and 19F NMR. The deprotonation of ‒OH group present in the salicyl moiety was initiated by hydrogen bonding and the plausible binding mode of BHP with Cd2+ and F‒ ion is shown in Scheme 2. Further, the absorbance and fluorescence intensity changes of Cd2+ ions (A472 nm) and F‒ ions (A482 nm, I603 nm) were plotted against [Cd2+] and [F‒] respectively provided a good linear relationship between both BHP and Cd2+/F‒ ions (Figure S5, S6 and S7, See ESI). From absorbance and fluorescence titration profile, the binding constant values of BHP for Cd2+/F‒ ions were calculated using modified Benesi-Hildebrand method ions (Figure S8, S9 and S10, See ESI). The binding constant values of BHP with Cd2+ ions were found to be 4.26 ×10-4 M from UV-visible titration profile. Similarly, the binding constant values of BHP with F‒ ions were estimated to be 6.03 ×10-3 M / and 3.01 × 10-4 M from UV-visible and fluorescence titration profile respectively. The detection limits (LOD) of F‒ were calculated to be 0.05 nM respectively. Moreover, the LOD values of BHP signifies that the probe might be utilized for the quantitative determination of F‒ ions in environment and real system. Figure 7 (a) Job’s plot for BHP with F‒ ion. (b) Job’s plot for BHP with Cd2+ ion Scheme 2. Binding mode of BHP with Cd2+/F‒ ions 3.5. 1H NMR titrations of BHP with F- ions In addition, to confirm and highly supported the 1:1 binding stoichiometry of probe with F- ions, 1H NMR titrations was performed. Upon addition of F- ion (0.5 equiv), the proton signal corresponds to phenolic –OH group at 11.14 ppm was gradually decreased. Further, addition of 1 equiv. of F- ions to BHP showed the complete disappearance of –OH proton signal as depicted in Figure 8. Moreover, the binding stoichiometric ratio of F- ion with BHP was further supported by 19F NMR experiment. The (H2F)- signal appeared at -124.33 ppm (Figure S11-S12, See ESI) confirms the deprotonation process arose from phenolic –OH proton. Figure 8 1H NMR titration of BHP with F- (0-1equiv) in DMSO-d6 3.6. DFT calculations of BHP with Cd2+/F- ion To recognize the fluorescence enhancement of probe BHP after complexation with F-, DFT calculations were accomplished. The optimized structures of BHP, BHP-Cd2+ and BHP-F- were obtained using DFT/B3LYP-6-311G and B3LYP/LanL2DZ basis sets respectively. The frontier molecular orbital diagram obtained from optimized structure of BHP is presented in Figure 9. Upon binding with Cd2+ ion, the HOMO and LUMO are delocalized over the entire salicyl unit and their energy gap was reduced. It is noteworthy that inhibition of charge transfer in probe BHP renders the reduction of absorbance at 367 nm and 470 nm. Moreover, Complexation of F- ion to the probe BHP leads to lowering of HOMO-LUMO energy gap. In the presence of F-, HOMO and LUMO are distributed over the whole molecule of BHP. From these results, the F- ion was efficiently binded and complexed with BHP than Cd2+ ion. Figure 9. Frontier molecular orbital diagram of BHP, BHP-Cd2+and BHP-F‒ 3.7. Live cell Imaging analysis of BHP in HeLa cells / Zebrafish embryos The cell viability or cytotoxicity analysis of BHP (0–200 µM) against Human HeLa cells were performed using MTT assay. In 100 µM of BHP, cell viability was obtained as too high as 98%. (Figure S13, See ESI). Hence, the probe was sucessfully used for live cell imaging analysis of F- ions in Figure 10. Live cell fluorescence imaging analysis of BHP in HeLa cells. (a) Bright field images of HeLa cells incubated with BHP (25 µM) for 3h (b) Fluorescence merged images of HeLa cells incubated with BHP (25 µM) (c) Fluorescence image of HeLa cells incubated with BHP (25 µM) alone (d) Fluorescence image of HeLa cells incubated with BHP (25 µM) and 25 µM of F‒ ions for 1 h HeLa cells. Further, the HeLa cells were pre-treated with 25 µM of BHP alone for 3 h. Then HeLa cells were seaded with 25 µM of F- ions for 1h. In the absence of F- ions, the probe BHP exposed a weak yellow fluorescence. However, addition of F- ions to the probe BHP induced a bright orange fluorescence (Figure 10). These results endorsed that the probe BHP can be successfully utilized for the intracellular fluorescence imaging analysis of F- ions in HeLa cells. Besides, the exceptional cell viability output of BHP has been further explored in four days Zebrafish embryos. Zebrafish has positioned as a well-known vertebrate model in numerous biological applications. From this perspective, we have utilized also zebrafish embryos as a living animal model to expose the excellent imaging potential of BHP for the detection of F‒ ion in the biological environment (Figure 11) . Figure 11. Fluorescence imaging analysis of F‒ ion in 4 days old Zebrafish embryos developed with BHP and various concentrations of F‒ ion (a) bright field images of BHP (25 µM) alone, (b) fluorescence merged images of BHP and F- ion (25 µM) (c) fluorescence image of BHP (25 µM) alone (d) 25 µM of F‒ ion for 2 h continuously incubated with BHP (25 µM) for 3 h. 3.8. Evaluation of BHP with previous reports The probe BHP has valid and multi features such as single step synthesis, dual-mode recognition, turn-on fluorescence response and colorimetric change. The probe BHP displayed unique sensing property among other dual sensors. Table S1 compares the sensing performance of BHP with recently reported F‒ receptors. Amid, BHP exhibits too low limit of detection when compared with other previously reported chemoreceptors cited in table S1. Also, the limit of detection of BHP is within the range of recommended limits set by both EPA and WHO for F‒ Ions. Moreover, the fluorescence imaging experiments inferred that the probe BHP can be utilized as potential tool for mapping F‒ ion distribution in HeLa cells and Zebrafish embryos. Conclusions We have designed and synthesized a new chromogenic and fluorogenic probe based on salicylhydrazone derivative for the selective and sensitive detection of both Cd2+/F- ions by colorimetrically and fluorimetrically respectively. As per our knowledge, it is a novel simple hydrazone receptor for sensing carcinogenic heavy metal Cd2+ via colorimetric method and biologically significant F‒ ion by both colorimetric and fluorimetric methods. The binding constant value of Cd2+ ion was found to be 4.26×10-4 M by UV-visible method where as 6.03×10-3 and 3.01×10-4 M for F- ion by both UV-visible and fluorescence methods respectively. The limit of detection was found to be 0.05 nM for F- ion. The excellent biological potential of BHP has been successfully utilized for the detection of F- ions in Zebrafish embryos and human HeLa cells. Acknowledgments The authors acknowledge the financial support from the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, Extramural Research, New Delhi, India (Grant No. 01(2901)17/EMR-II. The Department of Science and Technology, SERB, Extramural Major Research Project (Grant No. EMR/2015/000969), Department of Science and Technology, CERI, New Delhi, India (Grant No. DST/TM/CERI/C130(G) and we acknowledge the DST-FIST, DST-PURSE,DST-IRPHA, UPE programme and UGC-NRCBS, SBS, MKU for providing instrumentation facilities. References Jäkle, F. Chem. Rev. 2010, 110, 3985. 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There is a disparity between expectations that the members of a community will work together for the common good — and the stark reality that human beings form into groups, or parties, to engage in conflict with each other. This is particularly the case in so-called popular governments that include some wider political involvement by the people. In ancient Greece stasis, or endemic conflict between the democratic and oligarchic elements of a city was very common. Likewise, the late Roman Republic maintained a division between the populares and the optimates. In both cases there was violence as both sides battled for dominance. For example, in late republican Rome street gangs formed that employed intimidation and violence for political ends.In seventeenth century England there was conflict between those who favoured royal authority and those who wished to see more power devolved to parliament, which led to Civil War in the 1640s. Yet the English ideal, as expressed by The Book of Common Prayer (1549; and other editions) was that the country be quietly governed. It seemed perverse that the members of the body politic should be in conflict with each other. By the late seventeenth century England was still riven by conflict between two groups which became designated as the Whigs and the Tories. The divisions were both political and religious. Most importantly, these divisions were expressed at the local level, in such things as the struggle for the control of local corporations. They were not just political but could also be personal and often turned nasty as families contended for local control. The mid seventeenth century had been a time of considerable violence and warfare, not only in Europe and England but across Eurasia, including the fall of the Ming dynasty in China (Parker). This violence occurred in the wake of a cooler climate change, bringing in its wake crop failure followed by scarcity, hunger, disease and vicious warfare. Millions of people died.Conditions improved in the second half of the seventeenth century and countries slowly found their way to a new relative stability. The Qing created a new imperial order in China. In France, Louis XIV survived the Fronde and his answer to the rage and divisions of that time was the imposition of an autocratic and despotic state that simply prohibited the existence of divisions. Censorship and the inquisition flourished in Catholic Europe ensuring that dissidence would not evolve into violence fuelled by rage. In 1685, Louis expelled large numbers of Protestants from France.Divisions did not disappear in England at the end of the Civil War and the Restoration of Charles II. Initially, it appears that Charles sought to go down the French route. There was a regulation of ideas as new laws meant that the state licensed all printed works. There was an attempt to impose a bureaucratic authoritarian state, culminating in the short reign of James II (Pincus, Ertman). But its major effect, since the heightened fear of James’ Catholicism in Protestant England, was to stoke the ‘rage of party’ between those who supported this hierarchical model of social order and those who wanted political power less concentrated (Knights Representation, Plumb).The issue was presumed to be settled in 1688 when James was chased from the throne, and replaced by the Dutchman William and his wife Mary. In the official language of the day, liberty had triumphed over despotism and the ‘ancient constitution’ of the English had been restored to guarantee that liberty.However, three major developments were going on in England by the late seventeenth century: The first is the creation of a more bureaucratic centralised state along the lines of the France of Louis XIV. This state apparatus was needed to collect the taxes required to finance and administer the English war machine (Pincus). The second is the creation of a genuinely popular form of government in the wake of the expulsion of James and his replacement by William of Orange (Ertman). This means regular parliaments that are elected every three years, and also a free press to scrutinise political activities. The third is the development of financial institutions to enable the war to be conducted against France, which only comes to an end in 1713 (Pincus). Here, England followed the example of the Netherlands. There is the establishment of the bank of England in 1694 and the creation of a national debt. This meant that those involved in finance could make big profits out of financing a war, so a new moneyed class developed. England's TransformationIn the 1690s as England is transformed politically, religiously and economically, this develops a new type of society that unifies strong government with new financial institutions and arrangements. In this new political configuration, the big winners are the new financial elites and the large (usually Whig) aristocratic landlords, who had the financial resources to benefit from it. The losers were the smaller landed gentry who were taxed to pay for the war. They increasingly support the Tories (Plumb) who opposed both the war and the new financial elites it helped to create; leading to the 1710 election that overwhelmingly elected a Tory government led by Harley and Bolingbroke. This government then negotiated the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, with the Whigs retaining a small minority.History indicates that the post-1688 developments do not so much quell the ‘rage of party’ as encourage it and fan the fires of conflict and discontent. Parliamentary elections were held every three years and could involve costly, and potentially financially ruinous, contests between families competing for parliamentary representation. As these elections involved open voting and attempts to buy votes through such means as wining and dining, they could be occasions for riotous behaviour. Regular electoral contests, held in an electorate that was much larger than it would be one hundred years later, greatly heightened the conflicts and kept the political temperature at a high.Fig. 1: "To Him Pudel, Bite Him Peper"Moreover, there was much to fuel this conflict and to ‘maintain the rage’: First, the remodelling of the English financial system combined with the high level of taxation imposed largely on the gentry fuelled a rage amongst this group. This new world of financial investments was not part of their world. They were extremely suspicious of wealth not derived from landed property and sought to limit the power of those who held such wealth. Secondly, the events of 1688 split the Anglican Church in two (Pincus). The opponents of the new finance regimes tended also to be traditional High Church Anglicans who feared the newer, more tolerant government policy towards religion. Finally, the lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1695 meant that the English state was no longer willing to control the flow of information to the public (Kemp). The end result was that England in the 1690s became something akin to a modern public culture in which there was a relatively free flow of political information, constant elections held with a limited, but often substantial franchise, that was operating out of a very new commercial and financial environment. These political divisions were now deeply entrenched and very real passion animated each side of the political divide (Knights Devil).Under these circumstances, it was not possible simply to stamp out ‘the rage’ by the government repressing the voices of dissent. The authoritarian model for creating public conformity was not an option. A mechanism for lowering the political and religious temperature needed to arise in this new society where power and knowledge were diffused rather than centrally concentrated. Also, the English were aided by the return to a more benign physical environment. In economic terms it led to what Fischer terms the equilibrium of the Enlightenment. The wars of Louis XIV were a hangover from the earlier more desperate age; they prolonged the crisis of that age. Nevertheless, the misery of the earlier seventeenth century had passed. The grim visions of Calvinism (and Jansenism) had lost their plausibility. So the excessive violence of the 1640s was replaced by a more tepid form of political resistance, developing into the first modern expression of populism. So, the English achieved what Plumb calls ‘political stability’ were complex (1976), but relied on two things. The first was limiting the opportunity for political activity and the second was labelling political passion as a form of irrational behaviour – as an unsatisfactory or improper way of conducting oneself in the world. Emotions became an indulgence of the ignorant, the superstitious and the fanatical. This new species of humanity was the gentleman, who behaved in a reasonable and measured way, would express a person commensurate with the Enlightenment.This view would find its classic expression over a century later in Macaulay’s History of England, where the pre-1688 English squires are now portrayed in all their semi-civilised glory, “his ignorance and uncouthness, his low tastes and gross phrases, would, in our time, be considered as indicating a nature and a breeding thoroughly plebeian” (Macaulay 244). While the Revolution of 1688 is usually portrayed as a triumph of liberty, as stated, recent scholarship (Pincus, Ertman) emphasises how the attempts by both Charles and James to build a more bureaucratic state were crucial to the development of eighteenth century England. England was not really a land of liberty that kept state growth in check, but the English state development took a different path to statehood from countries such as France, because it involved popular institutions and managed to eliminate many of the corrupt practices endemic to a patrimonial regime.The English were as interested in ‘good police’, meaning the regulation of moral behaviour, as any state on the European continent, but their method of achievement was different. In the place of bureaucratic regulation, the English followed another route, later be termed in the 1760s as ‘civilisation’ (Melleuish). So, the Whigs became the party of rationality and reasonableness, and the Whig regime was Low Church, which was latitudinarian and amenable to rationalist Christianity. Also, the addition of the virtue and value of politeness and gentlemanly behaviour became the antidote to the “rage of party’”(Knights Devil 163—4) . The Whigs were also the party of science and therefore, followed Lockean philosophy. They viewed themselves as ‘reasonable men’ in opposition to their more fanatically inclined opponents. It is noted that any oligarchy, can attempt to justify itself as an ‘aristocracy’, in the sense of representing the ‘morally’ best people. The Whig aristocracy was more cosmopolitan, because its aristocrats had often served the rulers of countries other than England. In fact, the values of the Whig elite were the first expression of the liberal cosmopolitan values which are now central to the ideology of contemporary elites. One dimension of the Whig/Tory split is that while the Whig aristocracy had a cosmopolitan outlook as more proto-globalist, the Tories remained proto-nationalists. The Whigs became simultaneously the party of liberty, Enlightenment, cosmopolitanism, commerce and civilised behaviour. This is why liberty, the desire for peace and ‘sweet commerce’ came to be identified together. The Tories, on the other hand, were the party of real property (that is to say land) so their national interest could easily be construed by their opponents as the party of obscurantism and rage. One major incident illustrates how this evolved.The Trial of the High Church Divine Henry Sacheverell In 1709, the High Church Divine Henry Sacheverell preached a fiery sermon attacking the Whig revolutionary principles of resistance, and advocated obedience and unlimited submission to authority. Afterwards, for his trouble he was impeached before the House of Lords by the Whigs for high crimes and misdemeanours (Tryal 1710). As Mark Knights (6) has put it, one of his major failings was his breaching of the “Whig culture of politeness and moderation”. The Whigs also disliked Sacheverell for his charismatic appeal to women (Nicholson). He was found guilty and his sermons ordered to be burned by the hangman. But Sacheverell became simultaneously a martyr and a political celebrity leading to a mass outpouring of printed material (Knights Devil 166—186). Riots broke out in London in the wake of the trial’s verdict. For the Whigs, this stood as proof of the ‘rage’ that lurked in the irrational world of Toryism. However, as Geoffrey Holmes has demonstrated, these riots were not aimless acts of mob violence but were directed towards specific targets, in particular the meeting houses of Dissenters. History reveals that the Sacheverell riots were the last major riots in England for almost seventy years until the Lord Gordon anti-Catholic riots of 1780. In the short term they led to an overwhelming Tory victory at the 1710 elections, but that victory was pyrrhic. With the death of Queen Anne, followed by the accession of the Hanoverians to the throne, the Whigs became the party of government. Some Tories, such as Bolingbroke, panicked, and fled to France and the Court of the Pretender. The other key factor was the Treaty of Utrecht, brokered on England’s behalf by the Tory government of Harley and Bolingbroke that brought the Civil war to an end in 1713. England now entered an era of peace; there remained no longer the need to raise funds to conduct a war. The war had forced the English state to both to consolidate and to innovate.This can be viewed as the victory of the party of ‘politeness and moderation’ and the Enlightenment and hence the effective end of the ‘rage of party’. Threats did remain by the Pretender’s (James III) attempt to retake the English throne, as happened in 1715 and 1745, when was backed by the barbaric Scots.The Whig ascendancy, the ascendancy of a minority, was to last for decades but remnants of the Tory Party remained, and England became a “one-and one-half” party regime (Ertman 222). Once in power, however, the Whigs utilised a number of mechanisms to ensure that the age of the ‘rage of party’ had come to an end and would be replaced by one of politeness and moderation. As Plumb states, they gained control of the “means of patronage” (Plumb 161—88), while maintaining the ongoing trend, from the 1680s of restricting those eligible to vote in local corporations, and the Whigs supported the “narrowing of the franchise” (Plumb 102—3). Finally, the Septennial Act of 1717 changed the time between elections from three years to seven years.This lowered the political temperature but it did not eliminate the Tories or complaints about the political, social and economic path that England had taken. Rage may have declined but there was still a lot of dissent in the newspapers, in particular in the late 1720s in the Craftsman paper controlled by Viscount Bolingbroke. The Craftsman denounced the corrupt practices of the government of Sir Robert Walpole, the ‘robinocracy’, and played to the prejudices of the landed gentry. Further, the Bolingbroke circle contained some major literary figures of the age; but not a group of violent revolutionaries (Kramnick). It was true populism, from ideals of the Enlightenment and a more benign environment.The new ideal of ‘politeness and moderation’ had conquered English political culture in an era of Whig dominance. This is exemplified in the philosophy of David Hume and his disparagement of enthusiasm and superstition, and the English elite were also not fond of emotional Methodists, and Charles Wesley’s father had been a Sacheverell supporter (Cowan 43). A moderate man is rational and measured; the hoi polloi is emotional, faintly disgusting, and prone to rage.In the End: A Reduction of Rage Nevertheless, one of the great achievements of this new ideal of civility was to tame the conflict between political parties by recognising political division as a natural part of the political process, one that did not involve ‘rage’. This was the great achievement of Edmund Burke who, arguing against Bolingbroke’s position that 1688 had restored a unified political order, and hence abolished political divisions, legitimated such party divisions as an element of a civilised political process involving gentlemen (Mansfield 3). The lower orders, lacking the capacity to live up to this ideal, were prone to accede to forces other than reason, and needed to be kept in their place. This was achieved through a draconian legal code that punished crimes against property very severely (Hoppit). If ‘progress’ as later described by Macaulay leads to a polite and cultivated elite who are capable of conquering their rage – so the lower orders need to be repressed because they are still essentially barbarians. This was echoed in Macaulay’s contemporary, John Stuart Mill (192) who promulgated Orientals similarly “lacked the virtues” of an educated Briton.In contrast, the French attempt to impose order and stability through an authoritarian state fared no better in the long run. After 1789 it was the ‘rage’ of the ‘mob’ that helped to bring down the French Monarchy. At least, that is how the new cadre of the ‘polite and moderate’ came to view things.ReferencesBolingbroke, Lord. Contributions to the Craftsman. Ed. Simon Varney. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982.Cowan, Brian. “The Spin Doctor: Sacheverell’s Trial Speech and Political Performance in the Divided Society.” Faction Displayed: Reconsidering the Impeachment of Dr Henry Sacheverell. Ed. Mark Knights. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 28-46.Ertman, Thomas. Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.Fischer, David Hackett. The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History, New York: Oxford UP, 1996.Holmes, Geoffrey. “The Sacheverell Riots: The Crowd and the Church in Early Eighteenth-Century London.” Past and Present 72 (Aug. 1976): 55-85.Hume, David. “Of Superstition and Enthusiasm.” Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985. 73-9. Hoppit, Julian. A Land of Liberty? England 1689—1727, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.Kemp, Geoff. “The ‘End of Censorship’ and the Politics of Toleration, from Locke to Sacheverell.” Faction Displayed: Reconsidering the Impeachment of Dr Henry Sacheverell. Ed. Mark Knights. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 47-68.Knights, Mark. Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.———. The Devil in Disguise: Deception, Delusion, and Fanaticism in the Early English Enlightenment. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011.———. “Introduction: The View from 1710.” Faction Displayed: Reconsidering the Impeachment of Dr Henry Sacheverell. Ed. Mark Knights. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 1-15.Kramnick, Isaac. Bolingbroke & His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992.Macaulay, Thomas Babington. The History of England from the Accession of James II. London: Folio Society, 2009.Mansfield, Harvey. Statesmanship and Party Government: A Study of Burke and Bolingbroke. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1965.Melleuish, Greg. “Civilisation, Culture and Police.” Arts 20 (1998): 7-25.Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty, Representative Government, the Subjection of Women. London: Oxford UP, 1971.Nicholson, Eirwen. “Sacheverell’s Harlot’s: Non-Resistance on Paper and in Practice.” Faction Displayed: Reconsidering the Impeachment of Dr Henry Sacheverell. Ed. Mark Knights. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 69-79.Parker, Geoffrey. Global Crisis: War, Climate Change & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century. New Haven: Yale UP, 2013.Pincus, Steve. 1688: The First Modern Revolution. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009.Plumb, John H. The Growth of Political Stability in England 1675–1725. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.The Tryal of Dr Henry Sacheverell before the House of Peers, 1st edition. London: Jacob Tonson, 1710.

Introduction Sydney, Australia has experienced a sustained period of building and infrastructure development. There are hundreds of kilometres of bitumen and rail currently being laid. There are significant building projects in large central sites such as Darling Harbour and Barangaroo on the famous Harbour foreshore. The period of development has offered an unprecedented opportunity for the New South Wales (NSW) State Government to arrest the attention of the Sydney public through kilometres of construction hoarding. This opportunity has not been missed, with the public display of a new logo, complete with pithy slogan, on and around all manner of government projects and activities since September 2015. NSW is “making it happen” according to the logo being displayed. At first glance it is a proactive, simple and concise slogan that, according to the NSW Government brand guidelines, has a wide remit to be used for projects that relate to construction, economic growth, improved services, and major events. However, when viewed through the lens of public, expert, and media research into Sydney infrastructure development it can also be read as a message derived from reactive politics. This paper elucidates turning points in the history of the last decade of infrastructure building in NSW through qualitative primary research into media, public, and practice led discourse. Ultimately, through the prism of Colin Hay’s investigation into political disengagement, I question whether the current build-at-any-cost mentality and its mantra “making it happen” is in the long-term interest of the NSW constituency or the short-term interest of a political party or whether, more broadly, it reflects a crisis of identity for today’s political class. The Non-Launch of the New Logo Image 1: An ABC Sydney Tweet. Image credit: ABC Sydney. There is scant evidence of a specific launch of the logo. Michael Koziol states that to call it an unveiling, “might be a misnomer, given the stealth with which the design has started to make appearances on banners, barriers [see: Image 1, above] and briefing papers” (online). The logo has a wide range of applications. The NSW Government brand guidelines specify that the logo be used “on all projects, programs and announcements that focus on economic growth and confidence in investing in NSW” as well as “infrastructure for the future and smarter services” (30). The section of the guidelines relating to the “making it happen” logo begins with a full-colour, full-page photograph of the Barangaroo building development on Sydney Harbour—complete with nine towering cranes clearly visible across the project/page. The guidelines specifically mention infrastructure, housing projects, and major developments upfront in the section denoted to appropriate logo applications (31). This is a logo that the government clearly intends to use around its major projects to highlight the amount of building currently underway in NSW.In the first week of the logo’s release journalist Elle Hunt asks an unnamed government spokesperson for a definition of “it” in “making it happen.” The spokesperson states, “just a buzz around the state in terms of economic growth and infrastructure […] the premier [the now retired Mike Baird] has used the phrase several times this week in media conferences and it feels like we are making it happen.” Words like “buzz,” “feels like” and the ubiquitous “it” echo the infamous courtroom scene summation of Dennis Denuto from the 1997 Australian film The Castle that have deeply penetrated the Australian psyche and lexicon. Denuto (played by actor Tiriel Mora) is acting as a solicitor for Darryl Kerrigan (Michael Caton) in fighting the compulsory acquisition of the Kerrigan family property. In concluding an address to the court, Denuto states, “In summing up, it’s the constitution, it’s Mabo, it’s justice, it’s law, it’s the Vibe and, no that’s it, it’s the vibe. I rest my case.” All fun and irony (the reason for the house acquisition that inspired Denuto’s now famous speech was an airport infrastructure expansion project) aside, we can assume from the brand guidelines as well as the Hunt article that the intended meaning of “making it happen” is fluid and diffuse rather than fixed and specific. With this article I question why the government would choose to express this diffuse message to the public?Purpose, Scope, Method and ResearchTo explore this question I intertwine empirical research with a close critique of Colin Hay’s thesis on the problematisation of political decision-making—specifically the proliferation of certain tenets of public choice theory. My empirical research is a study of news media, public, and expert discourse and its impact on the success or otherwise of major rail infrastructure projects in Sydney. One case study project, initially announced as the North West Rail Line (NWR) and recently rebadged as the Sydney Metro Northwest (see: http://www.sydneymetro.info/northwest/project-overview), is at the forefront of the infrastructure building that the government is looking to highlight with “making it happen.” A comparison case study is the failed Sydney City Metro (SCM) project that preceded the NWR as the major Sydney rail infrastructure endeavour. I have written in greater detail on the scope of this research elsewhere (see: Richardson, “Curatorial”; “Upheaval”; “Hinterland”). In short, my empirical secondary research involved a study of print news media from 2010 to 2016 spanning Sydney’s two daily papers the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) and the Daily Telegraph (TELE). My qualitative research was conducted in 2013. The public qualitative research consisted of a survey, interviews, and focus groups involving 149 participants from across Sydney. The primary expert research consisted of 30 qualitative interviews with experts from politics, the news media and communications practice, as well as project delivery professions such as architecture and planning, project management, engineering, project finance and legal. Respondents were drawn from both the public and private sectors. My analysis of this research is undertaken in a manner similar to what Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke term a “thematic discourse analysis” (81). The intention is to examine “the ways in which events, realities, meanings and experiences and so on are the effects of a range of discourses operating within society.” A “theme” captures “something important about the data in relation to the research question,” and represents, “some level of patterned response or meaning within the data set.” Thematic analysis therefore, “involves the searching across a data set—be that a number of interviews or focus groups, or a range of texts—to find repeated patterns of meaning” (80-86).Governing Sydney: A Legacy of Inability, Broken Promises, and Failure The SCM was abandoned in February 2010. The project’s abandonment had long been foreshadowed in the news media (Anonymous, Future). In the days preceding and following the announcement, news media articles focussed almost exclusively on the ineptitude and wastefulness of a government that would again fail to deliver transport it had promised and invested in (Cratchley; Teutsch & Benns; Anonymous, Taxation). Immediately following the decision, the peak industry body, Infrastructure Partnerships Australia, asserted, “this decision shreds the credibility of the government in delivering projects and will likely make it much harder to attract investment and skills to deliver new infrastructure” (Anonymous, Taxation). The reported ineptitude of the then Labor Government of NSW and the industry fallout surrounding the decision were clearly established as the main news media angles. My print media research found coverage to be overwhelmingly and consistently negative. 70% of the articles studied were negatively inclined. Furthermore, approximately one-quarter featured statements pertaining directly to government paralysis and inability to deliver infrastructure.My public, expert, and media research revealed a number of “repeated patterns of meaning,” which Braun and Clarke describe as themes (86). There are three themes that are particularly pertinent to my investigation here. To describe the first theme I have used the statement, an inability of government to successfully deliver projects. The theme is closely tied to the two other interrelated themes—for one I use the statement, a legacy of failure to implement projects successfully—for the other I use a cycle of broken promises to describe the mounting number of announcements on projects that government then fails to deliver. Some of the more relevant comments, on this matter, collected throughout my research appear below.A former Sydney radio announcer, now a major project community consultation advisor, asserts that a “legacy issue” exists with regards to the poor performance of government over time. Through the SCM failure, which she asserts was “a perfectly sound idea,” the NSW Government came to represent “lost opportunities” resulting in a “massive erosion of public trust.” This sentiment was broadly mirrored across the public and industry expert research I conducted. For example, a public respondent states, “repeated public transport failures through the past 20 years has lowered my belief in future projects being successful.” And, a former director general of NSW planning asserts that because of the repeated project failures culminating in the demise of the SCM, “everybody is now so cynical”.Today under the “making it happen” banner, the major Sydney rail transport project investment is to the northwest of Sydney. There was a change of government in 2011 and the NWR was a key election promise for the incoming Premier at the time, Barry O’Farrell. The NWR project, (now renamed Sydney Metro Northwest as well as extended with new stages through the city to Sydney’s Southwest) remains ongoing and in many respects it appears that Sydney may have turned a corner with major infrastructure construction finally underway. Paradoxically though, the NWR project received far less support than the SCM from the majority of the 30 experts I interviewed. The most common theme from expert respondents (including a number working on the project) is that it is not the most urgent transport priority for Sydney but was instead a political decision. As a communications manager for a large Australian infrastructure provider states: “The NWR was an election promise, it wasn’t a decision based on whether the public wanted that rail link or not”. And, the aforementioned former director general of NSW planning mirrors this sentiment when she contends that the NWR is not a priority and “totally political”.My research findings strongly indicate that the failure of the SCM is in fact a vitally important catalyst for the implementation of the NWR. In other words, I assert that the formulation of the NWR has been influenced by the dominant themes that portray the abilities of government in a negative light—themes strengthened and amplified due to the failure of the SCM. Therefore, I assert that the NWR symbolises a desperate government determined to reverse these themes even if it means adopting a build at any cost mentality. As a respondent who specialises in infrastructure finance for one of Australia’s largest banks, states: “I think in politics there are certain promises that people attempt to keep and I think Barry O’Farrell has made it very clear that he is going to make sure those [NWR] tunnel boring machines are on the ground. So that’s going to happen rain, hail or shine”. Hating Politics My empirical research clearly elucidates the three themes I term an inability of government to successfully deliver projects, a legacy of failure and a cycle of broken promises. These intertwining themes are firmly embedded and strengthening. They also portray government in a negative light. I assert that the NWR, as a determined attempt to reverse these themes (irrespective of the cost), indicates a government at best reactive in its decision making and at worst desperate to reverse public and media perception.The negativity facing the NSW government seems extreme. However, in the context of Colin Hay’s work, the situation is perhaps more inevitable than surprising. In Why We Hate Politics (2007), Hay charts the history of public disengagement with western politics. He does this largely by arguing the considerable influence of problematic key tenets of public choice theory that permeate the discourse of most western democracies, including Australia. They are tenets that normalise depoliticisation and cast a lengthy shadow over the behaviour and motivations of politicians and bureaucrats. Public choice can be defined as the economic study of nonmarket decision-making, or, simply the application of economics to political science. The basic behavioral postulate of public choice, as for economics, is that man is an egoistic, rational, utility maximizer. (Mueller 395)Originating from rational choice theory generally and spurred by Kenneth Arrow’s investigations into rational choice and social policy more specifically, the basic premise of public choice is a privileging of individual values above rational collective choice in social policy development (Arrow; Dunleavy; Hauptman; Mueller). Hay asserts that public choice evolved as a theory throughout the 1960s and 70s in order to conceptualise a more market-orientated alternative to the influential theory of welfare economics. Both were formulated in response to a need for intervention and regulation of markets to correct their “natural tendency to failure” (95). In many ways public choice was a reaction to the “idealized depiction of the state” that welfare economics was seen to be propagating. Instead a “more sanguine and realistic view of the […] imperfect state, it was argued, would lead to a rather safer set of inferences about the need for state intervention” (96). Hay asserts that in effect by challenging the motivations of elected officials and public servants, public choice theory “assumed the worst”, branding all parties self-interested and declaring the state inefficient and ineffective in the delivery of public goods (96). Although, as Hay admits, public choice advocates perhaps provided “a healthy cynicism about both the motivations and the capabilities of politicians and public officials,” the theory was overly simplistic, overstated and unproven. Furthermore, when market woes became real rather than theoretical with crippling stagflation in the 1970s, public choice readily identify “villains” at the heart of the problem and the media and public leapt on it (Hay 109). An academic theory was thrust into mainstream discourse. Two results key to the investigations of this paper were 1) a perception of politics “synonymous with the blind pursuit of individual self interest” and 2) the demystification of the “public service ethos” (Hay 108-12). Hay concludes that instead the long-term result has been a conception of politicians and the bureaucracy that is “increasingly synonymous with duplicity, greed, corruption, interference and inefficiency” (160).Deciphering “Making It Happen” More than three decades on, echoes of public choice theory abound in my empirical research into NSW infrastructure building. In particular they are clearly evident in the three themes I term an inability of government to successfully deliver projects, a legacy of failure and a cycle of broken promises. Within this context, what then can we decipher from the pithy, ubiquitous slogan on a government logo? Of course, in one sense “making it happen” could be interpreted as a further attempt to reverse these three themes. The brand guidelines provide the following description of the logo: “the tone is confident, progressive, friendly, trustworthy, active, consistent, getting on with the job, achieving deadlines—“making it happen” (30). Indeed, this description seems the antithesis of perceptions of government identified in my primary research as well as the dogma of public choice theory. There is certainly expert evidence that one of the centrepieces of the government’s push to demonstrate that it is “making it happen”, the NWR, is a flawed project that represents a political decision. Therefore, it is hard not to be cynical and consider the government self-interested and shortsighted in its approach to building and development. If we were to adopt this view then it would be tempting to dismiss the new logo as political, reactive, and entirely self-serving. Further, with the worrying evidence of a ‘build at any cost’ mentality that may lead to wasted taxpayer funds and developments that future generations may judge harshly. As the principal of an national architectural practice states:politicians feel they have to get something done and getting something done is more important than the quality of what might be done because producing something of quality takes time […] it needs to have the support of a lot of people—it needs to be well thought through […] if you want to leap into some trite solution for something just to get something done, at the end of the day you’ll probably end up with something that doesn’t suit the taxpayers very well at all but that’s just the way politics is.In this context, the logo and its mantra could come to represent irreparable long-term damage to Sydney. That said, what if the cynics (this author included) tried to silence the public choice rhetoric that has become so ingrained? What if we reflect for a moment on the effects of our criticism – namely, the further perpetuation and deeper embedding of the cycle of broken promises, the legacy of failure and ineptitude? As Hay states, “if we look hard enough, we are likely to find plenty of behaviour consistent with such pessimistic assumptions. Moreover, the more we look the more we will reinforce that increasingly intuitive tendency” (160). What if we instead consider that by continuing to adopt the mantra of a political cynic, we are in effect perpetuating an overly simplistic, unsubstantiated theory that has cleverly affected us so profoundly? When confronted by the hundreds of kilometres of construction hoarding across Sydney, I am struck by the flippancy of “making it happen.” The vast expanse of hoarding itself symbolises that things are evidently “happening.” However, my research suggests these things could be other things with potential to deliver better public benefits. There is a conundrum here though—publicly expressing pessimism weakens further the utility of politicians and the bureaucracy and exacerbates the problems. Such is the self-fulfilling nature of public choice. ConclusionHay argues that rather than expecting politics and politicians to change, it is our expectations of what government can achieve that we need to modify. Hay asserts that although there is overwhelming evidence that we hate politics more now than at any stage in the past, he does not believe that, “today’s breed of politicians are any more sinful than their predecessors.” Instead he contends that it is more likely that “we have simply got into the habit of viewing them, and their conduct, in such terms” (160). The ramifications of such thinking ultimately, according to Hay, means a breakdown in “trust” that greatly hampers the “co-operation,” so important to politics (161). He implores us to remember “that politics can be more than the pursuit of individual utility, and that the depiction of politics in such terms is both a distortion and a denial of the capacity for public deliberation and the provision of collective goods” (162). What then if we give the NSW Government the benefit of the doubt and believe that the current building boom (including the decision to build the NWR) was not entirely self-serving but a line drawn in the sand with the determination to tackle a problem that is far greater than just that of Sydney’s transport or any other single policy or project problem—the ongoing issue of the spiralling reputation and identity of government decision-makers and perhaps even democracy generally as public choice ideals proliferate in western democracies like that of Australia’s most populous state. As a partner in a national architectural and planning practice states: I think in NSW in particular there has been such an under investment in infrastructure and so few of the promises have been kept […]. Who cares if NWR is right or not? If they actually build it they’ll be the first government in 25 years to do anything.ReferencesABC Sydney. “Confirmed. This is the new logo and phrase for #NSW getting its first outing. What do you think of it?” Twitter. 1 Sep. 2015. 19 Jan. 2017 <https://twitter.com/abcsydney/status/638909482697777152>.Arrow, Kenneth, J. Social Choice and Individual Values. New York: Wiley, 1951.Braun, Virginia, and Victoria Clarke. “Using Thematic Analysis in Psychology.” Qualitative Research in Psychology 3 (2006): 77-101. The Castle. Dir. Rob Sitch. Working Dog, 1997.Cratchley, Drew. “Builders Want Compo If Sydney Metro Axed.” Sydney Morning Herald 12 Feb. 2010. 17 Apr. 2012 <http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/builders-want-compo-if-sydney-metro-axed-20100212-nwn2.html>.Dunleavy, Patrick. Democracy, Bureaucracy and Public Choice. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991. Hauptmann, Emily. Putting Choice before Democracy: A Critique of Rational Choice Theory. Albany, New York: State U of New York P, 1996.Hay, Colin. Why We Hate Politics. Cambridge: Polity, 2007.Hunt, Elle. “New South Wales’ New Logo and Slogan Slips By Unnoticed – Almost.” The Guardian Australian Edition 10 Sep. 2015. 19 Jan. 2017 <https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/blog/2015/sep/10/new-south-wales-new-logo-and-slogan-slips-by-unnoticed-almost>.Koziol, Michael. “‘Making It Happen’: NSW Gets a New Logo. Make Sure You Don’t Breach Its Publishing Guidelines.” Sydney Morning Herald 11 Sep. 2015. 19 Jan. 2017 <http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/making-it-happen-nsw-gets-a-new-logo-make-sure-you-dont-breach-its-publishing-guidelines-20150911-gjk6z0.html>.Mueller, Dennis C. “Public Choice: A Survey.” Journal of Economic Literature 14 (1976): 395-433.“The NSW Government Branding Style Guide.” Sydney: NSW Government, 2015. 19 Jan. 2017 <http://www.advertising.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/downloads/page/nsw_government_branding_guide.pdf>.Perry, Jenny. “Future of Sydney Metro Remains Uncertain.” Rail Express 3 Feb. 2010. 25 Apr. 2017 <https://www.railexpress.com.au/future-of-sydney-metro-remains-uncertain/>.Richardson, Nicholas. “Political Upheaval in Australia: Media, Foucault and Shocking Policy.” ANZCA Conference Proceedings 2015, eds. D. Paterno, M. Bourk, and D. Matheson.———. “A Curatorial Turn in Policy Development? Managing the Changing Nature of Policymaking Subject to Mediatisation” M/C Journal 18.4 (2015).———. “The Hinterland of Power: Rethinking Mediatised Messy Policy.” PhD Thesis. University of Western Sydney, 2015.“Taxpayers Will Compensate Axed Metro Losers: Keneally.” Sydney Morning Herald 21 Feb. 2010. 17 Apr. 2012 <http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/taxpayers-will-compensate-axed-metro-losers-keneally-20100221-on6h.html>. Teutsch, Danielle, and Matthew Benns. “Call for Inquiry over $500m Poured into Doomed Metro.” Sydney Morning Herald 21 Mar. 2010. 17 Apr. 2012 <http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/call-for-inquiry-over-500m-poured-into-doomed-Metro-20100320-qn7b.html>.“Train Ready to Leave: Will Politicians Get on Board?” Sydney Morning Herald 13 Feb. 2010. 17 Apr. 2012 <http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/editorial/train-ready-to-leave-will-politicians-get-on-board-20100212-nxfk.html>.

AbstractCoastal communities in New Jersey (NJ), New York (NY), and Connecticut (CT) sustained huge structural loss during Sandy in 2012. We present a comprehensive science-based study to assess the role of coastal wetlands in buffering surge and wave in the tri-state by considering Sandy, a hypothetical Black Swan (BS) storm, and the 1% annual chance flood and wave event. Model simulations were conducted with and without existing coastal wetlands, using a dynamically coupled surge-wave model with two types of coastal wetlands. Simulated surge and wave for Sandy were verified with data at numerous stations. Structural loss estimated using real property data and latest damage functions agreed well with loss payout data. Results show that, on zip-code scale, the relative structural loss varies significantly with the percent wetland cover, the at-risk structural value, and the average wave crest height. Reduction in structural loss by coastal wetlands was low in Sandy, modest in the BS storm, and significant in the 1% annual chance flood and wave event. NJ wetlands helped to avoid 8%, 26%, 52% loss during Sandy, BS storm, and 1% event, respectively. This regression model can be used for wetland restoration planning to further reduce structural loss in coastal communities.

Proponents of the free culture movement argue that contemporary, “over-zealous” copyright laws have an adverse affect on the freedoms of consumers and creators to make use of copyrighted materials. Lessig, McLeod, Vaidhyanathan, Demers, and Coombe, to name but a few, detail instances where creativity and consumer use have been hindered by copyright laws. The “intellectual land-grab” (Boyle, “Politics” 94), instigated by the increasing value of intangibles in the information age, has forced copyright owners to seek maximal protection for copyrighted materials. A propertarian approach seeks to imbue copyrighted materials with the same inalienable rights as real property, yet copyright is not a property right, because “the copyright owner … holds no ordinary chattel” (Dowling v. United States 473 US 207, 216 [1985]). A fundamental difference resides in the exclusivity of use: “If you eat my apple, then I cannot” but “if you “take” my idea, I still have it. If I tell you an idea, you have not deprived me of it. An unavoidable feature of intellectual property is that its consumption is non-rivalrous” (Lessig, Code 131). It is, as James Boyle notes, “different” to real property (Shamans 174). Vaidhyanathan observes, “copyright in the American tradition was not meant to be a “property right” as the public generally understands property. It was originally a narrow federal policy that granted a limited trade monopoly in exchange for universal use and access” (11). This paper explores the ways in which “property talk” has infiltrated copyright discourse and endangered the utility of the law in fostering free and diverse forms of creative expression. The possessiveness and exclusion that accompany “property talk” are difficult to reconcile with the utilitarian foundations of copyright. Transformative uses of copyrighted materials such as mashing, sampling and appropriative art are incompatible with a propertarian approach, subjecting freedom of creativity to arbitary licensing fees that often extend beyond the budget of creators (Collins). “Property talk” risks making transformative works an elitist form of creativity, available only to those with the financial resources necessary to meet the demands for licences. There is a wealth of decisions throughout American and English case law that sustain Vaidhyanathan’s argument (see for example, Donaldson v. Becket 17 Cobbett Parliamentary History, col. 953; Wheaton v. Peters 33 US 591 [1834]; Fox Film Corporation v. Doyal 286 US 123 [1932]; US v. Paramount Pictures 334 US 131 [1948]; Mazer v. Stein 347 US 201, 219 [1954]; Twentieth Century Music Corp. v. Aitken 422 U.S. 151 [1975]; Aronson v. Quick Point Pencil Co. 440 US 257 [1979]; Dowling v. United States 473 US 207 [1985]; Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises 471 U.S. 539 [1985]; Luther R. Campbell a.k.a. Luke Skyywalker, et al. v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. 510 U.S 569 [1994].). As Lemley states, however, “Congress, the courts and commentators increasingly treat intellectual property as simply a species of real property rather than as a unique form of legal protection designed to deal with public goods problems” (1-2). Although section 106 of the Copyright Act 1976 grants exclusive rights, sections 107 to 112 provide freedoms beyond the control of the copyright owner, undermining the exclusivity of s.106. Australian law similarly grants exceptions to the exclusive rights granted in section 31. Exclusivity was a principal objective of the eighteenth century Stationers’ argument for a literary property right. Sir William Blackstone, largely responsible for many Anglo-American concepts concerning the construction of property law, defined property in absolutist terms as “that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the whole universe” (2). On the topic of reprints he staunchly argued an author “has clearly a right to dispose of that identical work as he pleases, and any attempt to take it from him, or vary the disposition he has made of it, is an invasion of his right of property” (405-6). Blackstonian copyright advanced an exclusive and perpetual property right. Blackstone’s interpretation of Lockean property theory argued for a copyright that extended beyond the author’s expression and encompassed the very “style” and “sentiments” held therein. (Tonson v. Collins [1760] 96 ER 189.) According to Locke, every Man has a Property in his own Person . . . The Labour of his Body and the Work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property. (287-8) Blackstone’s inventive interpretation of Locke “analogised ideas, thoughts, and opinions with tangible objects to which title may be taken by occupancy under English common law” (Travis 783). Locke’s labour theory, however, is not easily applied to intangibles because occupancy or use is non-rivalrous. The appropriate extent of an author’s proprietary right in a work led Locke himself to a philosophical impasse (Bowrey 324). Although Blackstonian copyright was suppressed by the House of Lords in the eighteenth century (Donaldson v. Becket [1774] 17 Cobbett Parliamentary History, col. 953) and by the Supreme Court sixty years later (Wheaton v. Peters 33 US 591 [1834]), it has never wholly vacated copyright discourse. “Property talk” is undesirable in copyright discourse because it implicates totalitarian notions such as exclusion and inalienable private rights of ownership with no room for freedom of creativity or to use copyrighted materials for non-piracy related purposes. The notion that intellectual property is a species of property akin with real property is circulated by media companies seeking greater control over copyrighted materials, but the extent to which “property talk” has been adopted by the courts and scholars is troubling. Lemley (3-5) and Bell speculate whether the term “intellectual property” carries any responsibility for the propertisation of intangibles. A survey of federal court decisions between 1943 and 2003 reveals an exponential increase in the usage of the term. As noted by Samuelson (398) and Cohen (379), within the spheres of industry, culture, law, and politics the word “property” implies a broader scope of rights than those associated with a grant of limited monopoly. Music United claims “unauthorized reproduction and distribution of copyrighted music is JUST AS ILLEGAL AS SHOPLIFTING A CD”. James Brown argues sampling from his records is tantamount to theft: “Anything they take off my record is mine . . . Can I take a button off your shirt and put it on mine? Can I take a toenail off your foot – is that all right with you?” (Miller 1). Equating unauthorised copying with theft seeks to socially demonise activities occurring outside of the permission culture currently being fostered by inventive interpretations of the law. Increasing propagation of copyright as the personal property of the creator and/or copyright owner is instrumental in efforts to secure further legislative or judicial protection: Since 1909, courts and corporations have exploited public concern for rewarding established authors by steadily limiting the rights of readers, consumers, and emerging artists. All along, the author was deployed as a straw man in the debate. The unrewarded authorial genius was used as a rhetorical distraction that appealed to the American romantic individualism. (Vaidhyanathan 11) The “unrewarded authorial genius” was certainly tactically deployed in the eighteenth century in order to generate sympathy in pleas for further protection (Feather 71). Supporting the RIAA, artists including Britney Spears ask “Would you go into a CD store and steal a CD? It’s the same thing – people going into the computers and logging on and stealing our music”. The presence of a notable celebrity claiming file-sharing is equivalent to stealing their personal property is a more publicly acceptable spin on the major labels’ attempts to maintain a monopoly over music distribution. In 1997, Congress enacted the No Electronic Theft Act which extended copyright protection into the digital realm and introduced stricter penalties for electronic reproduction. The use of “theft” in the title clearly aligns the statute with a propertarian portrayal of intangibles. Most movie fans will have witnessed anti-piracy propaganda in the cinema and on DVDs. Analogies between stealing a bag and downloading movies blur fundamental distinctions in the rivalrous/non-rivalrous nature of tangibles and intangibles (Lessig Code, 131). Of critical significance is the infiltration of “property talk” into the courtrooms. In 1990 Judge Frank Easterbrook wrote: Patents give a right to exclude, just as the law of trespass does with real property … Old rhetoric about intellectual property equating to monopoly seemed to have vanished, replaced by a recognition that a right to exclude in intellectual property is no different in principle from the right to exclude in physical property … Except in the rarest case, we should treat intellectual and physical property identically in the law – which is where the broader currents are taking us. (109, 112, 118) Although Easterbrook refers to patents, his endorsement of “property talk” is cause for concern given the similarity with which patents and copyrights have been historically treated (Ou 41). In Grand Upright v. Warner Bros. Judge Kevin Duffy commenced his judgment with the admonishment “Thou shalt not steal”. Similarly, in Jarvis v. A&M Records the court stated “there can be no more brazen stealing of music than digital sampling”. This move towards a propertarian approach is misguided. It runs contrary to the utilitarian principles underpinning copyright ideology and marginalises freedoms protected by the fair use doctrine, hence Justice Blackman’s warning that “interference with copyright does not easily equate with” interference with real property (Dowling v. United States 473 US 207, 216 [1985]). The framing of copyright in terms of real property privileges private monopoly over, and to the detriment of, the public interest in free and diverse creativity as well as freedoms of personal use. It is paramount that when dealing with copyright cases, the courts remain aware that their decisions involve not pure economic regulation, but regulation of expression, and what may count as rational where economic regulation is at issue is not necessarily rational where we focus on expression – in a Nation constitutionally dedicated to the free dissemination of speech, information, learning and culture. (Eldred v. Ashcroft 537 US 186 [2003] [J. Breyer dissenting]). Copyright is the prize in a contest of property vs. policy. As Justice Blackman observed, an infringer invades a statutorily defined province guaranteed to the copyright holder alone. But he does not assume physical control over the copyright; nor does he wholly deprive its owner of its use. While one may colloquially link infringement with some general notion of wrongful appropriation, infringement plainly implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud. (Dowling v. United States 473 US 207, 217-218 [1985]). Copyright policy places a great deal of control and cultural determinism in the hands of the creative industries. Without balance, oppressive monopolies form on the back of rights granted for the welfare of society in general. If a society wants to be independent and rich in diverse forms of cultural production and free expression, then the courts cannot continue to apply the law from within a propertarian paradigm. The question of whether culture should be determined by control or freedom in the interests of a free society is one that rapidly requires close attention – “it’s no longer a philosophical question but a practical one”. References Bayat, Asef. “Un-Civil Society: The Politics of the ‘Informal People.’” Third World Quarterly 18.1 (1997): 53-72. Bell, T. W. “Author’s Welfare: Copyright as a Statutory Mechanism for Redistributing Rights.” Brooklyn Law Review 69 (2003): 229. Blackstone, W. Commentaries on the Laws of England: Volume II. New York: Garland Publishing, 1978. (Reprint of 1783 edition.) Boyle, J. Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996. Boyle, J. “A Politics of Intellectual Property: Environmentalism for the Net?” Duke Law Journal 47 (1997): 87. Bowrey, K. “Who’s Writing Copyright’s History?” European Intellectual Property Review 18.6 (1996): 322. Cohen, J. “Overcoming Property: Does Copyright Trump Privacy?” University of Illinois Journal of Law, Technology & Policy 375 (2002). Collins, S. “Good Copy, Bad Copy.” (2005) M/C Journal 8.3 (2006). http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/02-collins.php>. Coombe, R. The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. Demers, J. Steal This Music. Athens, Georgia: U of Georgia P, 2006. Easterbrook, F. H. “Intellectual Property Is Still Property.” (1990) Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy 13 (1990): 108. Feather, J. Publishing, Piracy and Politics: An Historical Study of Copyright in Britain. London: Mansell, 1994. Lemley, M. “Property, Intellectual Property, and Free Riding.” Texas Law Review 83 (2005): 1031. Lessig, L. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Lessing, L. The Future of Ideas. New York: Random House, 2001. Lessig, L. Free Culture. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004. Locke, J. Two Treatises of Government. Ed. Peter Laslett. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1988. McLeod, K. “How Copyright Law Changed Hip Hop: An Interview with Public Enemy’s Chuck D and Hank Shocklee.” Stay Free (2002). 14 June 2006 http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/20/public_enemy.html>. McLeod, K. “Confessions of an Intellectual (Property): Danger Mouse, Mickey Mouse, Sonny Bono, and My Long and Winding Path as a Copyright Activist-Academic.” Popular Music & Society 28 (2005): 79. McLeod, K. Freedom of Expression: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity. United States: Doubleday Books, 2005. Miller, M.W. “Creativity Furor: High-Tech Alteration of Sights and Sounds Divides the Art World.” Wall Street Journal (1987): 1. Ou, T. “From Wheaton v. Peters to Eldred v. Reno: An Originalist Interpretation of the Copyright Clause.” Berkman Center for Internet & Society (2000). 14 June 2006 http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/eldredvashcroft/cyber/OuEldred.pdf>. Samuelson, P. “Information as Property: Do Ruckelshaus and Carpenter Signal a Changing Direction in Intellectual Property Law?” Catholic University Law Review 38 (1989): 365. Travis, H. “Pirates of the Information Infrastructure: Blackstonian Copyright and the First Amendment.” Berkeley Technology Law Journal 15 (2000): 777. Vaidhyanathan, S. Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity. New York: New York UP, 2003. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Collins, Steve. "‘Property Talk’ and the Revival of Blackstonian Copyright." M/C Journal 9.4 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0609/5-collins.php>. APA Style Collins, S. (Sep. 2006) "‘Property Talk’ and the Revival of Blackstonian Copyright," M/C Journal, 9(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0609/5-collins.php>.

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. 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Introduction Since the early 2000s, and especially since the onset of COVID-19 and long periods of lockdown, board games have seen a revival in popularity. The increasing popularity of board games are part of what Julie Lennett, a toy industry analyst at NPD Group, describes as the “nesting trend”: families have more access to entertainment at home and are eschewing expensive nights out (cited in Birkner 7). While on-demand television is a significant factor in this trend, for Moriaty and Kay (6), who wouldn’t “welcome [the] chance to turn away from their screens” to seek the “warmth and connection you get from playing games with live human family and friends?” For others, playing board games can simply be about nostalgia. Board games have a long history not specific to one period, geography, or culture. Likely board games were developed to do two things – teach and entertain. This remains the case today. Historically, miniature versions of battles or hunts were played out in what we might recognise today as a board game. Trade, war, and science impacted on their development, as did the printing press, which allowed for the standardisation of rules. Chess had many variations prior to the fifteenth century. Similarly, the Industrial Revolution allowed for the mass production of board games, boosting their popularity across nations, class, and age (Walker 13). Today, regardless of or because of our digital lives, we are in a “board game renaissance” (Booth 1). Still played on rainy days, weekends, and holidays, we now also play board games in dedicated game board cafés like the Haunted Game Café in America, the Snakes and Lattes in Canada, or the Mind Café in Singapore. In the board game café Draughts in the UK, customers pay £5 to select and play one of 800 board games, including classics like Monopoly and Cluedo. These cafes are important as they are “helping manufacturers to understand the kind of games that appeal to the larger section of players” (Atrizton). COVID-19 caused board game sales to increase. The global market was predicted to increase by US$1 billion in 2021, compared to 2020 (Jarvis). Total sales of board games in Australia are expected to reach AU$86 million in 2023, an almost 10 per cent increase from the preceding year (Statista "Board Games – Australia"). The emergence of Kickstarter, a global crowdfunding platform which funds new board games, is filling the gap in the contemporary board game market, with board games generating 20 per cent of the total funding raised (Carter). Board games are predicted to continue to grow, with the global market revenue record at US$19 billion dollars in 2022, a figure that is expected to rise to US$40 billion within 6 years (Atrizton). If the current turn towards board games represents a desire to escape from the digital world, the Internet is also contributing to the renaissance. Ex-Star Trek actor Wil Wheaton hosts the popular Web series TableTop, in which each episode explains a board game that is then played, usually with celebrities. The Internet also provides “communities” in which fans can share their enthusiasm, be it as geek culture or cult fandom (Booth 2). Booth provides an eloquent explanation, however, for the allure of face-to-face board games: “they remind us of our face-to-face past, and recall a type of pre-digital luddism where we can circle around the ‘campfire’ of the game board” (Booth 1-2). What makes a board game successful is harder to define. Phillip Orbanes, an American game designer and former vice-president of research and development at Parker Brothers, has attempted to elucidate the factors that make a good board game: “make the rules simple and unambiguous … don’t frustrate the casual player … establish a rhythm … focus on what’s happening off the board … give ‘em chances to come from behind … [and] provide outlets for latent talents” (Orbanes 52-55). Orbanes also says it is important to understand that what “happens off the board is just as important to the experience as the physical game itself” (Orbanes 51). Tristan Donovan contends that there are four broad stages of modern board games, beginning with the folk era when games had no fixed author, their rules were mutable, and local communities adapted the game to suit their sensibilities. Chess is an example of this, with the game only receiving the fixed rules we know today when tournaments and organisations saw the need for a singular set of rules. Mass production of games was the second stage, marking “the single biggest shift in board game history – a total flip in how people understood, experienced and played board games. Games were no long[er] malleable objects owned by the commons, but products created usually in the pursuit of profit” (Donovan 267). An even more recent development in game boards was the introduction of mass produced plastics, which reduced the cost of board game construction and allowed for a wider range of games to be produced. This was particularly evident in the post-war period. Games today are often thought of as global, which allows gamers to discover games from other regions and cultures, such as Catan (Klaus Teuber, 1995), a German game that may not have enjoyed its immense success if it were not for the Internet. Board game players are broadly categorised into two classes: the casual gamer and the hobby or serious gamer (Rogerson and Gibbs). The most popular game from the mass production era is Monopoly, the focus of this article. The History of Monopoly Monopoly was designed and patented by American Elizabeth Magie (1866-1948) in 1902, and was originally called The Landlord’s Game. The game was based on the anti-monopoly taxation principles of Henry George (1839-1897), who argued that people should own 100 per cent of what they make and the land should belong to everyone. Land ownership, considered George, only benefitted land owners, and forces working people to pay exorbitant rent. Magie’s original version of the game was designed to demonstrate how rents enrich property owners and impoverish tenants. Renters in Australia’s property market today may recognise this side of ruthless capitalism. In 1959 Fidel Castro thought Monopoly “sufficiently redolent of capitalism” that he “ordered the ­destruction of every Monopoly set in Cuba” (McManus). Magie, however, was not credited with being the original inventor of Monopoly: rather, this credit was given to Charles Darrow. In 2014, the book The Monopolist: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal behind the World's Favorite Board Game by Mary Pilon re-established Magie as the inventor of Monopoly, with her role and identity unearthed by American Ralph Anspach (1926-2022), an Adam Smith economist, Polish-German refugee, and anti-Vietnam protestor. According to Pilon, Magie, a suffragette and progressive economic and political thinker, was a Georgist advocate, particularly of his anti-monopolist policies, and it was this that informed her game’s narrative. An unmarried daughter of Scottish immigrants, she was a Washington homeowner, familiar with the grid-like street structure of the national capital. Magie left school at 13 to help support her family who were adversely impacted upon by the Panic of 1873, which saw economic collapse because of falling silver prices, railroad speculation, and property losses. She worked as a stenographer and teacher of Georgist single tax theory. Seeking a broader platform for her economic ideas, and with the growing popularity of board games in middle class homes, in 1904 Magie secured a patent for The Landlord’s Game, at a time when women only held 1 per cent of US patents (Pilon). The original game included deeds and play money and required players to earn wages via labour and pay taxes. The board provided a circular path (as opposed to the common linear path) in which players circled through rental properties and railroads, and could acquire food, with natural reserves (oil, coal, farms, and forests) unable to be monopolised. However, she created two sets of rules – the monopoly rules familiar to today’s players, and anti-monopoly rules in which tensions over human greed and altruism could be played out by participants. Magie started her own New York firm to manufacture and distribute the game, continued the struggle for women’s equality, and raged against wealthy monopolists of the day such as Andrew Carnegie (Pilon). By the late 1920, the game, mostly referred to as the ‘monopoly’ game, was popular, but many who played the game were playing handmade versions, likely unaware of the original Landlord’s Game. In 1931, mass-produced versions of the game, now titled Finance, began to appear, with some changes, including the ability to purchase properties, along with rule books. Occurring at the same time as the emergence of fixed-price goods in large department stores, the game, which now included chance cards, continued to be popular. It was Charles Darrow who sold Monopoly to Parker Brothers, even if he did not invent it. Darrow was introduced to one of the variants of the game and became obsessed with the game, which now featured the Community Chest and Free Parking, but his version did not have a set of rules. An unemployed ex-serviceman with no college education, Darrow struggled to provide for his family. By 1932, America was in the grip of the Great Depression, with housing prices collapsing and squatting common in large American cities. Befriending an artist, Darrow sought to provide a more dynamic and professional version of the game and complete it with a set of rules. In 1933, Darrow marketed his version of the game, titled Mr Monopoly, and it was purchased by Parker Brothers for US$7,000 in 1935. Magie received just US $500 (Farzan). Monopoly, as it was rebranded, was initial sold for $2 a game, and Parker Brothers sold 278,000 games in the first year. In 1936, consumers purchased 1.7 million editions of the game, generating millions of dollars in profits for Parker Brothers, who prior to Monopoly were on the brink of collapse (Pilon). Mary Pilon’s The Monopolists also reveals the struggle of Ralph Anspach in the 1970s to sell his Anti-Monopoly board games, which Parker Brothers fought in the courts. Anspach’s game sought to undermine the power of capitalist monopolies, which he had witnessed directly and negatively impact on fuel prices in America in the early 1970s. Hence the aim was to produce a game with an anti-monopolist narrative grounded in the free-market thinking of Adam Smith. Players were rewarded by breaking monopoly ownerships of utilities such as railroads and energy and metal reserves. In preparing his case against Parker Brothers, Anspach “accidentally discovered the true history of the game”, which began with Magie’s Landlord’s Game. Magie herself had battled with Parker Brothers in order to be “credited as the real originator of the game” and, like Anspach, reveal how Parker Brothers had changed the anti-capitalist narrative of the game, making it the “exact opposite” of its original aims (Landlordsgame). Anspach’s court room version of his battle with Parker Brothers was published in 2000, titled Monopolygate: During a David and Goliath Battle, the Inventor of the Anti-Monopoly® Game Uncovers the Secret History of Monopoly®. Monopoly Today Monopoly is now produced by Hasbro. It is the highest selling board game of all time, with an estimated 275 million units of Monopoly sold (Lee). Fan bases are clearly large too: the official Monopoly Facebook accounts report 9.9m likes (Facebook), and 68% of American households report owning a version of Monopoly (Statista "Which"). At the end of the twentieth century it was estimated that 550 million, or one in 12 people worldwide, had played the game (Guinness World Records "Most Popular"). Today it is estimated that Monopoly has been played by more than one billion people, and the digital Monopoly version has had over 100 million downloads (Johnson). The ability to play beloved board games with a computer opponent or with other players via the Internet arguably adds to the longevity of classic board games such as Monopoly. Yet research shows that despite Monopoly being widely owned, it is often not played as much as other games in people’s homes (d'Astous and Gagnon 84). D’Astous and Gagnon found that players in their study chose Monopoly to play on average six times a year, less than half the times they played Cluedo (13 times a year) or Scrabble (15 times). As Michael Whelan points out, Magie’s original goal was to make a statement about capitalism and landlords: a single player would progress round the board building an empire, whilst the others were doomed to slowly descend into bankruptcy. It was “never meant to be fun for anyone but the winner” (Whelan). Despite Monopoly’s longevity and impressive sales record, it is perhaps paradoxical to find that it is not a particularly popular or enjoyed game. Board Game Geek, the popular board game Website, reports in 2023 that the average rating for Monopoly by over 33,000 members is just 4.4 out of 10, and is ranked the 23,834th most popular game on the site (Board Game Geek). This is mirrored in academic studies: for example, when examining Orbane’s tenets for a good board game, d’Astous and Gagnon (84) found that players' appreciation of Monopoly was generally low. Not only is appreciation low for the game itself, it is also low for player antics during the game. A 2021 survey found that Monopoly causes the most fights, with 20% of households reporting “their game nights with friends or family members are often or always disrupted by competitive or unfriendly behaviour”, leading to players or even the game itself being banned (Lemore). Clearly Orbane’s tenet that the game “generates fun” is missing here (Orbanes 52). Commentators ask why Monopoly remains the best-selling board game of all time when the game has the “astonishing ability to sow seeds of discord” (Berical). Despite the claims that playing Monopoly causes disharmony, the game does allow for player agency. Perhaps more than any other board game, Monopoly is subjected to ‘house rules’. Buzzfeed reported 15 common house rules that many people think are official rules. In 2014 the official Monopoly Facebook page posted a video claiming that “68% of Americans have never read the official game rules” and that “49% of Americans had admitted to playing with their own ‘house rules’”. A look through these rules reveals that players are often trying to restore the balance of power in the game, or in other words increase the chance that a player can win. Hasbro has embraced these rules by incorporating some of them into the official rules. By incorporating players' amendments to the game, Hasbro can keep the Monopoly relevant. In another instance, Hasbro asked fans to vote on new tokens, which led to the thimble token being replaced with a Tyrannosaurus Rex. This was reversed in 2022 when nostalgic fans lobbied for the thimble’s return. Hasbro has also been an innovator by creating special rules for individual editions: for example, the Longest Game Ever edition (2019) slows players down by using only a single dice and has an extended game board. This demonstrates that Hasbro is keen to innovate and evolve the game to meet player expectations. Innovation and responsiveness to fans is one way that Hasbro has maintained Monopoly’s position as highest-selling board game. The only place the original Monopoly rules seem to be played intact are at the official competitions. Collecting and Nostalgia The characteristics of Monopoly allow for a seemingly infinite number of permutations. The places on the board can be real or fictional, making it easily adaptable to accommodate different environments. This is a factor in Monopoly’s longevity. The number of Monopoly editions are endless, with BoardGameGeek listing over 1,300 versions of the game on its site. Monopoly editions range from collector and commemorative editions to music, television, and film versions, actor-based editions, sports club editions, editions tied to toy franchises, animal lover editions, country editions, city editions, holiday editions, car brand editions, motor bike editions, as well as editions such as Monopoly Space, editions branded to popular confectionary, Ms Monopoly, and Go Green Monopoly. Each of these contain their own unique modifications. The Go Green version includes greenhouses, dice are made from FSC-certified wood from well-managed forests, tokens are made with plant-based plastic derived from sugarcane, a renewable raw material, and players can vie to have monopolistic control over renewable energy firms, solar farms, and bike paths. Licencing agreements allows Hasbro to leverage two sets of popular culture fans and collectors simultaneously: fans of Monopoly and its different versions, and fans of the Monopoly branded collectable, such as the Elvis Collector’s edition and Breaking Bad Monopoly. Apart from licencing, what else explains the longevity of Monopoly? Fred Davis demonstrates that nostalgia is an important sociological phenomenon, allowing consumers to re-imagine the past via iconic items including toys. Generation Y, also known as Millennials or digital natives, a cohort born between 1982 and 1994 who have grown up with technology as part of their everyday lives, are particularly interested in ‘heritage-inspired’ goods (Marchegiani and Phau). These consumers enjoy the past with a critical eye, drawn by the aesthetic properties of nostalgic goods rather than a direct personal connection (Goulding 575). Popular culture items are a site of widespread collecting behaviour (Geraghty 2). Belk argues that our possessions are used to construct our social selves. Collectors are a special kind of consumer: where consumers use and discard goods as needed, collectors engage with goods as special objects to be maintained and preserved (Belk 254), which is often achieved through ritualistic behaviour (McCracken 49). This is not to say that items in a collection are removed from use entirely: often being used in the normal manner, for example, clothing collectors will wear their items, yet take care of them in the a way they see akin to conservatorship (Hackett). Collections are often on display, often using the flexibility of the Internet as showground, as is the case with Neil Scallon’s world record collection of Monopoly’s 3,554 different versions of the game (World of Monopoly). Monopoly has low barriers to entry for a collector, as many sets retail at a low price-point, yet there are a few sets which are very expensive. The most expensive Monopoly set of all time retailed for US$2 million, and the cost was mainly borne out of the luxurious materials used: “the board is made from 23 carat gold, rubies and sapphires top the chimneys of the solid gold houses and hotels and the dice have 42 full cut diamonds for spots” (Guinness World Records "Most Expensive"). Conclusion The recent resurgence in board game popularity has only served to highlight Monopoly’s longevity. Through clever marketing and leveraging of nostalgia and popular culture fandoms, Hasbro has managed to retain Monopoly’s position as the number one board game, in sales figures at least. Despite its popularity, Monopoly suffers from a reputation as a conduit for poor player behaviour, as one person triumphs at the downfall of the other players. The game dynamics punish those whom fortune did not reward. In this regard, Elizabeth Magie’s initial aim of teaching about the unfairness of capitalism can be considered a resounding success. 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IntroductionThe Internet (especially in the so-called Web 2.0 phase), digital media and file-sharing networks have thrust copyright law under public scrutiny, provoking discourses questioning what is fair in the digital age. Accessible hardware and software has led to prosumerism – creativity blending media consumption with media production to create new works that are freely disseminated online via popular video-sharing Web sites such as YouTube or genre specific music sites like GYBO (“Get Your Bootleg On”) amongst many others. The term “prosumer” is older than the Web, and the conceptual convergence of producer and consumer roles is certainly not new, for “at electric speeds the consumer becomes producer as the public becomes participant role player” (McLuhan 4). Similarly, Toffler’s “Third Wave” challenges “old power relationships” and promises to “heal the historic breach between producer and consumer, giving rise to the ‘prosumer’ economics” (27). Prosumption blurs the traditionally separate consumer and producer creating a new creative era of mass customisation of artefacts culled from the (copyrighted) media landscape (Tapscott 62-3). Simultaneously, corporate interests dependent upon the protections provided by copyright law lobby for augmented rights and actively defend their intellectual property through law suits, takedown notices and technological reinforcement. Despite a lack demonstrable economic harm in many cases, the propertarian approach is winning and frequently leading to absurd results (Collins).The balance between private and public interests in creative works is facilitated by the doctrine of fair use (as codified in the United States Copyright Act 1976, section 107). The majority of copyright laws contain “fair” exceptions to claims of infringement, but fair use is characterised by a flexible, open-ended approach that allows the law to flex with the times. Until recently the defence was unique to the U.S., but on 2 January Israel amended its copyright laws to include a fair use defence. (For an overview of the new Israeli fair use exception, see Efroni.) Despite its flexibility, fair use has been systematically eroded by ever encroaching copyrights. This paper argues that copyright enforcement has spun out of control and the raison d’être of the law has shifted from being “an engine of free expression” (Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises 471 U.S. 539, 558 (1985)) towards a “legal regime for intellectual property that increasingly looks like the law of real property, or more properly an idealized construct of that law, one in which courts seeks out and punish virtually any use of an intellectual property right by another” (Lemley 1032). Although the copyright landscape appears bleak, two recent cases suggest that fair use has not fallen by the wayside and may well recover. This paper situates fair use as an essential legal and cultural mechanism for optimising creative expression.A Brief History of CopyrightThe law of copyright extends back to eighteenth century England when the Statute of Anne (1710) was enacted. Whilst the length of this paper precludes an in depth analysis of the law and its export to the U.S., it is important to stress the goals of copyright. “Copyright in the American tradition was not meant to be a “property right” as the public generally understands property. It was originally a narrow federal policy that granted a limited trade monopoly in exchange for universal use and access” (Vaidhyanathan 11). Copyright was designed as a right limited in scope and duration to ensure that culturally important creative works were not the victims of monopolies and were free (as later mandated in the U.S. Constitution) “to promote the progress.” During the 18th century English copyright discourse Lord Camden warned against propertarian approaches lest “all our learning will be locked up in the hands of the Tonsons and the Lintons of the age, who will set what price upon it their avarice chooses to demand, till the public become as much their slaves, as their own hackney compilers are” (Donaldson v. Becket 17 Cobbett Parliamentary History, col. 1000). Camden’s sentiments found favour in subsequent years with members of the North American judiciary reiterating that copyright was a limited right in the interests of society—the law’s primary beneficiary (see for example, Wheaton v. Peters 33 US 591 [1834]; Fox Film Corporation v. Doyal 286 US 123 [1932]; US v. Paramount Pictures 334 US 131 [1948]; Mazer v. Stein 347 US 201, 219 [1954]; Twentieth Century Music Corp. v. Aitken 422 U.S. 151 [1975]; Aronson v. Quick Point Pencil Co. 440 US 257 [1979]; Dowling v. United States 473 US 207 [1985]; Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises 471 U.S. 539 [1985]; Luther R. Campbell a.k.a. Luke Skyywalker, et al. v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. 510 U.S 569 [1994]). Putting the “Fair” in Fair UseIn Folsom v. Marsh 9 F. Cas. 342 (C.C.D. Mass. 1841) (No. 4,901) Justice Storey formulated the modern shape of fair use from a wealth of case law extending back to 1740 and across the Atlantic. Over the course of one hundred years the English judiciary developed a relatively cohesive set of principles governing the use of a first author’s work by a subsequent author without consent. Storey’s synthesis of these principles proved so comprehensive that later English courts would look to his decision for guidance (Scott v. Stanford L.R. 3 Eq. 718, 722 (1867)). Patry explains fair use as integral to the social utility of copyright to “encourage. . . learned men to compose and write useful books” by allowing a second author to use, under certain circumstances, a portion of a prior author’s work, where the second author would himself produce a work promoting the goals of copyright (Patry 4-5).Fair use is a safety valve on copyright law to prevent oppressive monopolies, but some scholars suggest that fair use is less a defence and more a right that subordinates copyrights. Lange and Lange Anderson argue that the doctrine is not fundamentally about copyright or a system of property, but is rather concerned with the recognition of the public domain and its preservation from the ever encroaching advances of copyright (2001). Fair use should not be understood as subordinate to the exclusive rights of copyright owners. Rather, as Lange and Lange Anderson claim, the doctrine should stand in the superior position: the complete spectrum of ownership through copyright can only be determined pursuant to a consideration of what is required by fair use (Lange and Lange Anderson 19). The language of section 107 suggests that fair use is not subordinate to the bundle of rights enjoyed by copyright ownership: “Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work . . . is not an infringement of copyright” (Copyright Act 1976, s.107). Fair use is not merely about the marketplace for copyright works; it is concerned with what Weinreb refers to as “a community’s established practices and understandings” (1151-2). This argument boldly suggests that judicial application of fair use has consistently erred through subordinating the doctrine to copyright and considering simply the effect of the appropriation on the market place for the original work.The emphasis on economic factors has led courts to sympathise with copyright owners leading to a propertarian or Blackstonian approach to copyright (Collins; Travis) propagating the myth that any use of copyrighted materials must be licensed. Law and media reports alike are potted with examples. For example, in Bridgeport Music, Inc., et al v. Dimension Films et al 383 F. 3d 400 (6th Cir. 2004) a Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the transformative use of a three-note guitar sample infringed copyrights and that musicians must obtain licence from copyright owners for every appropriated audio fragment regardless of duration or recognisability. Similarly, in 2006 Christopher Knight self-produced a one-minute television advertisement to support his campaign to be elected to the board of education for Rockingham County, North Carolina. As a fan of Star Wars, Knight used a makeshift Death Star and lightsaber in his clip, capitalising on the imagery of the Jedi Knight opposing the oppressive regime of the Empire to protect the people. According to an interview in The Register the advertisement was well received by local audiences prompting Knight to upload it to his YouTube channel. Several months later, Knight’s clip appeared on Web Junk 2.0, a cable show broadcast by VH1, a channel owned by media conglomerate Viacom. Although his permission was not sought, Knight was pleased with the exposure, after all “how often does a local school board ad wind up on VH1?” (Metz). Uploading the segment of Web Junk 2.0 featuring the advertisement to YouTube, however, led Viacom to quickly issue a take-down notice citing copyright infringement. Knight expressed his confusion at the apparent unfairness of the situation: “Viacom says that I can’t use my clip showing my commercial, claiming copy infringement? As we say in the South, that’s ass-backwards” (Metz).The current state of copyright law is, as Patry says, “depressing”:We are well past the healthy dose stage and into the serious illness stage ... things are getting worse, not better. Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners. Like Humpty-Dumpty, the copyright law we used to know can never be put back together.The erosion of fair use by encroaching private interests represented by copyrights has led to strong critiques leveled at the judiciary and legislators by Lessig, McLeod and Vaidhyanathan. “Free culture” proponents warn that an overly strict copyright regime unbalanced by an equally prevalent fair use doctrine is dangerous to creativity, innovation, culture and democracy. After all, “few, if any, things ... are strictly original throughout. Every book in literature, science and art, borrows, and must necessarily borrow, and use much which was well known and used before. No man creates a new language for himself, at least if he be a wise man, in writing a book. He contents himself with the use of language already known and used and understood by others” (Emerson v. Davis, 8 F. Cas. 615, 619 (No. 4,436) (CCD Mass. 1845), qted in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose, 62 U.S.L.W. at 4171 (1994)). The rise of the Web 2.0 phase with its emphasis on end-user created content has led to an unrelenting wave of creativity, and much of it incorporates or “mashes up” copyright material. As Negativland observes, free appropriation is “inevitable when a population bombarded with electronic media meets the hardware [and software] that encourages them to capture it” and creatively express themselves through appropriated media forms (251). The current state of copyright and fair use is bleak, but not beyond recovery. Two recent cases suggest a resurgence of the ideology underpinning the doctrine of fair use and the role played by copyright.Let’s Go CrazyIn “Let’s Go Crazy #1” on YouTube, Holden Lenz (then eighteen months old) is caught bopping to a barely recognizable recording of Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” in his mother’s Pennsylvanian kitchen. The twenty-nine second long video was viewed a mere twenty-eight times by family and friends before Stephanie Lenz received an email from YouTube informing her of its compliance with a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) take-down notice issued by Universal, copyright owners of Prince’s recording (McDonald). Lenz has since filed a counterclaim against Universal and YouTube has reinstated the video. Ironically, the media exposure surrounding Lenz’s situation has led to the video being viewed 633,560 times at the time of writing. Comments associated with the video indicate a less than reverential opinion of Prince and Universal and support the fairness of using the song. On 8 Aug. 2008 a Californian District Court denied Universal’s motion to dismiss Lenz’s counterclaim. The question at the centre of the court judgment was whether copyright owners should consider “the fair use doctrine in formulating a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.” The court ultimately found in favour of Lenz and also reaffirmed the position of fair use in relation to copyright. Universal rested its argument on two key points. First, that copyright owners cannot be expected to consider fair use prior to issuing takedown notices because fair use is a defence, invoked after the act rather than a use authorized by the copyright owner or the law. Second, because the DMCA does not mention fair use, then there should be no requirement to consider it, or at the very least, it should not be considered until it is raised in legal defence.In rejecting both arguments the court accepted Lenz’s argument that fair use is an authorised use of copyrighted materials because the doctrine of fair use is embedded into the Copyright Act 1976. The court substantiated the point by emphasising the language of section 107. Although fair use is absent from the DMCA, the court reiterated that it is part of the Copyright Act and that “notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A” a fair use “is not an infringement of copyright” (s.107, Copyright Act 1976). Overzealous rights holders frequently abuse the DMCA as a means to quash all use of copyrighted materials without considering fair use. This decision reaffirms that fair use “should not be considered a bizarre, occasionally tolerated departure from the grand conception of the copyright design” but something that it is integral to the constitution of copyright law and essential in ensuring that copyright’s goals can be fulfilled (Leval 1100). Unlicensed musical sampling has never fared well in the courtroom. Three decades of rejection and admonishment by judges culminated in Bridgeport Music, Inc., et al v. Dimension Films et al 383 F. 3d 400 (6th Cir. 2004): “Get a license or do not sample. We do not see this stifling creativity in any significant way” was the ruling on an action brought against an unlicensed use of a three-note guitar sample under section 114, an audio piracy provision. The Bridgeport decision sounded a death knell for unlicensed sampling, ensuring that only artists with sufficient capital to pay the piper could legitimately be creative with the wealth of recorded music available. The cost of licensing samples can often outweigh the creative merit of the act itself as discussed by McLeod (86) and Beaujon (25). In August 2008 the Supreme Court of New York heard EMI v. Premise Media in which EMI sought an injunction against an unlicensed fifteen second excerpt of John Lennon’s “Imagine” featured in Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a controversial documentary canvassing alleged chilling of intelligent design proponents in academic circles. (The family of John Lennon and EMI had previously failed to persuade a Manhattan federal court in a similar action.) The court upheld Premise Media’s arguments for fair use and rejected the Bridgeport approach on which EMI had rested its entire complaint. Justice Lowe criticised the Bridgeport court for its failure to examine the legislative intent of section 114 suggesting that courts should look to the black letter of the law rather than blindly accept propertarian arguments. This decision is of particular importance because it establishes that fair use applies to unlicensed use of sound recordings and re-establishes de minimis use.ConclusionThis paper was partly inspired by the final entry on eminent copyright scholar William Patry’s personal copyright law blog (1 Aug. 2008). A copyright lawyer for over 25 years, Patry articulated his belief that copyright law has swung too far away from its initial objectives and that balance could never be restored. The two cases presented in this paper demonstrate that fair use – and therefore balance – can be recovered in copyright. The federal Supreme Court and lower courts have stressed that copyright was intended to promote creativity and have upheld the fair doctrine, but in order for the balance to exist in copyright law, cases must come before the courts; copyright myth must be challenged. As McLeod states, “the real-world problems occur when institutions that actually have the resources to defend themselves against unwarranted or frivolous lawsuits choose to take the safe route, thus eroding fair use”(146-7). ReferencesBeaujon, Andrew. “It’s Not the Beat, It’s the Mocean.” CMJ New Music Monthly. April 1999.Collins, Steve. “Good Copy, Bad Copy: Covers, Sampling and Copyright.” M/C Journal 8.3 (2005). 26 Aug. 2008 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/02-collins.php›.———. “‘Property Talk’ and the Revival of Blackstonian Copyright.” M/C Journal 9.4 (2006). 26 Aug. 2008 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0609/5-collins.php›.Donaldson v. Becket 17 Cobbett Parliamentary History, col. 953.Efroni, Zohar. “Israel’s Fair Use.” The Center for Internet and Society (2008). 26 Aug. 2008 ‹http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/5670›.Lange, David, and Jennifer Lange Anderson. “Copyright, Fair Use and Transformative Critical Appropriation.” Conference on the Public Domain, Duke Law School. 2001. 26 Aug. 2008 ‹http://www.law.duke.edu/pd/papers/langeand.pdf›.Lemley, Mark. “Property, Intellectual Property, and Free Riding.” Texas Law Review 83 (2005): 1031.Lessig, Lawrence. The Future of Ideas. New York: Random House, 2001.———. Free Culture. New York: Penguin, 2004.Leval, Pierre. “Toward a Fair Use Standard.” Harvard Law Review 103 (1990): 1105.McDonald, Heather. “Holden Lenz, 18 Months, versus Prince and Universal Music Group.” About.com: Music Careers 2007. 26 Aug. 2008 ‹http://musicians.about.com/b/2007/10/27/holden-lenz-18-months-versus-prince-and-universal-music-group.htm›.McLeod, Kembrew. “How Copyright Law Changed Hip Hop: An interview with Public Enemy’s Chuck D and Hank Shocklee.” Stay Free 2002. 26 Aug. 2008 ‹http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/20/public_enemy.html›.———. Freedom of Expression: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity. United States: Doubleday, 2005.McLuhan, Marshall, and Barrington Nevitt. Take Today: The Executive as Dropout. Ontario: Longman Canada, 1972.Metz, Cade. “Viacom Slaps YouTuber for Behaving like Viacom.” The Register 2007. 26 Aug. 2008 ‹http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/30/viacom_slaps_pol/›.Negativland, ed. Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2. Concord: Seeland, 1995.Patry, William. The Fair Use Privilege in Copyright Law. Washington DC: Bureau of National Affairs, 1985.———. “End of the Blog.” The Patry Copyright Blog. 1 Aug. 2008. 27 Aug. 2008 ‹http://williampatry.blogspot.com/2008/08/end-of-blog.html›.Tapscott, Don. The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence. New York: McGraw Hill, 1996.Toffler, Alvin. The Third Wave. London, Glasgow, Sydney, Auckland. Toronto, Johannesburg: William Collins, 1980.Travis, Hannibal. “Pirates of the Information Infrastructure: Blackstonian Copyright and the First Amendment.” Berkeley Technology Law Journal, Vol. 15 (2000), No. 777.Vaidhyanathan, Siva. Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity. New York; London: New York UP, 2003.

As a scholarly discourse, transmedia storytelling relies heavily on conservative constructions of authorship that laud corporate architects and patriarchs such as George Lucas and J.J. Abrams as exemplars of “the creator.” This piece argues that transmedia theory works to construct patriarchal ideals of individual authorship to the detriment of alternative conceptions of transmediality, storyworlds, and authorship. The genesis for this piece was our struggle to find a transmedia storyworld that we were both familiar with, that also qualifies as “legitimate” transmedia in the eyes of our prospective scholarly readers. After trying to wrangle our various interests, fandoms, and areas of expertise into harmony, we realized we were exerting more effort in this process of validating stories as transmedia than actually examining how stories spread across various platforms, how they make meanings, and what kinds of pleasures they offer audiences. Authorship is a definitive criterion of transmedia storytelling theory; it is also an academic red herring. We were initially interested in investigating the possible overdeterminations between the healthcare industry and Breaking Bad (2008-2013). The series revolves around a high school chemistry teacher who launches a successful meth empire as a way to pay for his cancer treatments that a dysfunctional US healthcare industry refuses to fund. We wondered if the success of the series and the timely debates on healthcare raised in its reception prompted any PR response from or discussion among US health insurers. However, our concern was that this dynamic among medical and media industries would not qualify as transmedia because these exchanges were not authored by Vince Gilligan or any of the credited creators of Breaking Bad. Yet, why shouldn’t such interfaces between the “real world” and media fiction count as part of the transmedia story that is Breaking Bad? Most stories are, in some shape or form, transmedia stories at this stage, and transmedia theory acknowledges there is a long history to this kind of practice (Freeman). Let’s dispense with restrictive definitions of transmediality and turn attention to how storytelling behaves in a digital era, that is, the processes of creating, disseminating and amending stories across many different media, the meanings and forms such media and communications produce, and the pleasures they offer audiences.Can we think about how health insurance companies responded to Breaking Bad in terms of transmedia storytelling? Defining Transmedia Storytelling via AuthorshipThe scholarly concern with defining transmedia storytelling via a strong focus on authorship has traced slight distinctions between seriality, franchising, adaptation and transmedia storytelling (Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling;” Johnson, “Media Franchising”). However, the theoretical discourse on authorship itself and these discussions of the tensions between forms are underwritten by a gendered bias. Indeed, the very concept of transmediality may be a gendered backlash against the rising prominence of seriality as a historically feminised mode of storytelling, associated with television and serial novels.Even with the move towards traditionally lowbrow, feminized forms of trans-serial narrative, the majority of academic and popular criticism of transmedia storytelling reproduces and reinstates narratives of male-centred, individual authorship that are historically descended from theorizations of the auteur. Auteur theory, which is still considered a legitimate analytical framework today, emerged in postwar theorizations of Hollywood film by French critics, most prominently in the journal Cahiers du Cinema, and at the nascence of film theory as a field (Cook). Auteur theory surfaced as a way to conceptualise aesthetic variation and value within the Fordist model of the Hollywood studio system (Cook). Directors were identified as the ultimate author or “creative source” if a film sufficiently fitted a paradigm of consistent “vision” across their oeuvre, and they were thus seen as artists challenging the commercialism of the studio system (Cook). In this way, classical auteur theory draws a dichotomy between art and authorship on one side and commerce and corporations on the other, strongly valorising the former for its existence within an industrial context dominated by the latter. In recent decades, auteurist notions have spread from film scholarship to pervade popular discourses of media authorship. Even though transmedia production inherently disrupts notions of authorship by diffusing the act of creation over many different media platforms and texts, much of the scholarship disproportionately chooses to vex over authorship in a manner reminiscent of classical auteur theory.In scholarly terms, a chief distinction between serial storytelling and transmedia storytelling lies in how authorship is constructed in relation to the text: serial storytelling has long been understood as relying on distributed authorship (Hilmes), but transmedia storytelling reveres the individual mastermind, or the master architect who plans and disseminates the storyworld across platforms. Henry Jenkins’ definition of transmedia storytelling is multifaceted and includes, “the systematic dispersal of multiple textual elements across many channels, which reflects the synergies of media conglomeration, based on complex story-worlds, and coordinated authorial design of integrated elements” (Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling”). Jenkins is perhaps the most pivotal figure in developing transmedia studies in the humanities to date and a key reference point for most scholars working in this subfield.A key limitation of Jenkins’ definition of transmedia storytelling is its emphasis on authorship, which persists in wider scholarship on transmedia storytelling. Jenkins focuses on the nature of authorship as a key characteristic of transmedia productions that distinguishes them from other kinds of intertextual and serial stories:Because transmedia storytelling requires a high degree of coordination across the different media sectors, it has so far worked best either in independent projects where the same artist shapes the story across all of the media involved or in projects where strong collaboration (or co-creation) is encouraged across the different divisions of the same company. (Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling”)Since the texts under discussion are commonly large in their scale, budget, and the number of people employed, it is reductive to credit particular individuals for this work and implicitly dismiss the authorial contributions of many others. Elaborating on the foundation set by Jenkins, Matthew Freeman uses Foucauldian concepts to describe two “author-functions” focused on the role of an author in defining the transmedia text itself and in marketing it (Freeman 36-38). Scott, Evans, Hills, and Hadas similarly view authorial branding as a symbolic industrial strategy significant to transmedia storytelling. Interestingly, M.J. Clarke identifies the ways transmedia television texts invite audiences to imagine a central mastermind, but also thwart and defer this impulse. Ultimately, Freeman argues that identifiable and consistent authorship is a defining characteristic of transmedia storytelling (Freeman 37), and Suzanne Scott argues that transmedia storytelling has “intensified the author’s function” from previous eras (47).Industry definitions of transmediality similarly position authorship as central to transmedia storytelling, and Jenkins’ definition has also been widely mobilised in industry discussions (Jenkins, “Transmedia” 202). This is unsurprising, because defining authorial roles has significant monetary value in terms of remuneration and copyright. In speaking to the Producers Guild of America, Jeff Gomez enumerated eight defining characteristics of transmedia production, the very first of which is, “Content is originated by one or a very few visionaries” (PGA Blog). Gomez’s talk was part of an industry-driven bid to have “Transmedia Producer” recognised by the trade associations as a legitimate and significant role; Gomez was successful and is now recognised as a transmedia producer. Nevertheless, his talk of “visionaries” not only situates authorship as central to transmedia production, but constructs authorship in very conservative, almost hagiographical terms. Indeed, Leora Hadas analyses the function of Joss Whedon’s authorship of Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D (2013-) as a branding mechanism and argues that authors are becoming increasingly visible brands associated with transmedia stories.Such a discourse of authorship constructs individual figures as artists and masterminds, in an idealised manner that has been strongly critiqued in the wake of poststructuralism. It even recalls tired scholarly endeavours of divining authorial intention. Unsurprisingly, the figures valorised for their transmedia authorship are predominantly men; the scholarly emphasis on authorship thus reinforces the biases of media industries. Further, it idolises these figures at the expense of unacknowledged and under-celebrated female writers, directors and producers, as well as those creative workers labouring “below the line” in areas like production design, art direction, and special effects. Far from critiquing the biases of industry, academic discourse legitimises and lauds them.We hope that scholarship on transmedia storytelling might instead work to open up discourses of creation, production, authorship, and collaboration. For a story to qualify as transmedia is it even necessary to have an identifiable author? Transmedia texts and storyworlds can be genuinely collaborative or authorless creations, in which the harmony of various creators’ intentions may be unnecessary or even undesirable. Further, industry and academics alike often overlook examples of transmedia storytelling that might be considered “lowbrow.” For example, transmedia definitions should include Antonella the Uncensored Reviewer, a relatively small-scale, forty-something, plus size, YouTube channel producer whose persona is dispersed across multiple formats including beauty product reviews, letter writing, as well as interactive sex advice live casts. What happens when we blur the categories of author, celebrity, brand, and narrative in scholarship? We argue that these roles are substantially blurred in media industries in which authors like J.J. Abrams share the limelight with their stars as well as their corporate affiliations, and all “brands” are sutured to the storyworld text. These various actors all shape and are shaped by the narrative worlds they produce in an author-storyworld nexus, in which authorship includes all people working to produce the storyworld as well as the corporation funding it. Authorship never exists inside the limits of a single, male mind. Rather it is a field of relations among various players and stakeholders. While there is value in delineating between these roles for purposes of analysis and scholarly discussion, we should acknowledge that in the media industry, the roles of various stakeholders are increasingly porous.The current academic discourse of transmedia storytelling reconstructs old social biases and hierarchies in contexts where they might be most vulnerable to breakdown. Scott argues that,despite their potential to demystify and democratize authorship between producers and consumers, transmedia stories tend to reinforce boundaries between ‘official’ and ‘unauthorized’ forms of narrative expansion through the construction of a single author/textual authority figure. (44)Significantly, we suggest that it is the theorisation of transmedia storytelling that reinforces (or in fact constructs anew) an idealised author figure.The gendered dimension of the scholarly distinction between serialised (or trans-serial) and transmedial storytelling builds on a long history in the arts and the academy alike. In fact, an important precursor of transmedia narratives is the serialized novel of the Victorian era. The literature of Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Harriet Beecher Stowe was published in serial form and among the most widely read of the Victorian era in Western culture (Easley; Flint 21; Hilmes). Yet, these novels are rarely given proportional credit in what is popularly taught as the Western literary canon. The serial storytelling endemic to television as a medium has similarly been historically dismissed and marginalized as lowbrow and feminine (at least until the recent emergence of notions of the industrial role of the “showrunner” and the critical concept of “quality television”). Joanne Morreale outlines how trans-serial television examples, like The Dick Van Dyke Show, which spread their storyworlds across a number of different television programs, offer important precursors to today’s transmedia franchises (Morreale). In television’s nascent years, the anthology plays of the 1940s and 50s, which were discrete, unconnected hour-length stories, were heralded as cutting-edge, artistic and highbrow while serial narrative forms like the soap opera were denigrated (Boddy 80-92). Crucially, these anthology plays were largely created by and aimed at males, whereas soap operas were often created by and targeted to female audiences. The gendered terms in which various genres and modes of storytelling are discussed have implications for the value assigned to them in criticism, scholarship and culture more broadly (Hilmes; Kuhn; Johnson, “Devaluing”). Transmedia theory, as a scholarly discourse, betrays similarly gendered leanings as early television criticism, in valorising forms of transmedia narration that favour a single, male-bodied, and all-powerful author or corporation, such as George Lucas, Jim Henson or Marvel Comics.George Lucas is often depicted in scholarly and popular discourses as a headstrong transmedia auteur, as in the South Park episode ‘The China Problem’ (2008)A Circle of Men: Fans, Creators, Stories and TheoristsInterestingly, scholarly discourse on transmedia even betrays these gendered biases when exploring the engagement and activity of audiences in relation to transmedia texts. Despite the definitional emphasis on authorship, fan cultures have been a substantial topic of investigation in scholarly studies of transmedia storytelling, with many scholars elevating fans to the status of author, exploring the apparent blurring of these boundaries, and recasting the terms of these relationships (Scott; Dena; Pearson; Stein). Most notably, substantial scholarly attention has traced how transmedia texts cultivate a masculinized, “nerdy” fan culture that identifies with the male-bodied, all-powerful author or corporation (Brooker, Star Wars, Using; Jenkins, Convergence). Whether idealising the role of the creators or audiences, transmedia theory reinforces gendered hierarchies. Star Wars (1977-) is a pivotal corporate transmedia franchise that significantly shaped the convergent trajectory of media industries in the 20th century. As such it is also an anchor point for transmedia scholarship, much of which lauds and legitimates the creative work of fans. However, in focusing so heavily on the macho power struggle between George Lucas and Star Wars fans for authorial control over the storyworld, scholarship unwittingly reinstates Lucas’s status as sole creator rather than treating Star Wars’ authorship as inherently diffuse and porous.Recent fan activity surrounding animated adult science-fiction sitcom Rick and Morty (2013-) further demonstrates the macho culture of transmedia fandom in practice and its fascination with male authors. The animated series follows the intergalactic misadventures of a scientific genius and his grandson. Inspired by a seemingly inconsequential joke on the show, some of its fans began to fetishize a particular, limited-edition fast food sauce. When McDonalds, the actual owner of that sauce, cashed in by promoting the return of its Szechuan Sauce, a macho culture within the show’s fandom reached its zenith in the forms of hostile behaviour at McDonalds restaurants and online (Alexander and Kuchera). Rick and Morty fandom also built a misogynist reputation for its angry responses to the show’s efforts to hire a writer’s room that gave equal representation to women. Rick and Morty trolls doggedly harassed a few of the show’s female writers through 2017 and went so far as to post their private information online (Barsanti). Such gender politics of fan cultures have been the subject of much scholarly attention (Johnson, “Fan-tagonism”), not least in the many conversations hosted on Jenkins’ blog. Gendered performances and readings of fan activity are instrumental in defining and legitimating some texts as transmedia and some creators as masterminds, not only within fandoms but also in the scholarly discourse.When McDonalds promoted the return of their Szechuan Sauce, in response to its mention in the story world of animated sci-fi sitcom Rick and Morty, they contributed to transmedia storytelling.Both Rick and Morty and Star Wars are examples of how masculinist fan cultures, stubborn allegiances to male authorship, and definitions of transmedia converge both in academia and popular culture. While Rick and Morty is, in reality, partly female-authored, much of its media image is still anchored to its two male “creators,” Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon. Particularly in the context of #MeToo feminism, one wonders how much female authorship has been elided from existing storyworlds and, furthermore, what alternative examples of transmedia narration are exempt from current definitions of transmediality.The individual creator is a social construction of scholarship and popular discourse. This imaginary creator bears little relation to the conditions of creation and production of transmedia storyworlds, which are almost always team written and collectively authored. Further, the focus on writing itself elides the significant contributions of many creators such as those in production design (Bevan). Beyond that, what creative credit do focus groups deserve in shaping transmedia stories and their multi-layered, multi-platformed reaches? Is authorship, or even credit, really the concept we, as scholars, want to invest in when studying these forms of narration and mediation?At more symbolic levels, the seemingly exhaustless popular and scholarly appetite for male-bodied authorship persists within storyworlds themselves. The transmedia examples popularly and academically heralded as “seminal” centre on patrimony, patrilineage, and inheritance (i.e. Star Wars [1977-] and The Lord of the Rings [1937-]). Of course, Harry Potter (2001-2009) is an outlier as the celebrification of J.K. Rowling provides a strong example of credited female authorship. However, this example plays out many of the same issues, albeit the franchise is attached to a woman, in that it precludes many of the other creative minds who have helped shape Harry Potter’s world. How many more billions of dollars need we invest in men writing about the mysteries of how other men spread their genetic material across fictional universes? Moreover, transmedia studies remains dominated by academic men geeking out about how fan men geek out about how male creators write about mostly male characters in stories about … men. There are other stories waiting to be told and studied through the practices and theories of transmedia. These stories might be gender-inclusive and collective in ways that challenge traditional notions of authorship, control, rights, origin, and property.Obsession with male authorship, control, rights, origin, paternity and property is recognisible in scholarship on transmedia storytelling, and also symbolically in many of the most heralded examples of transmedia storytelling, such as the Star Wars saga.Prompting Broader DiscussionThis piece urges the development of broader understandings of transmedia storytelling. A range of media scholarship has already begun this work. Jonathan Gray’s book on paratexts offers an important pathway for such scholarship by legitimating ancillary texts, like posters and trailers, that uniquely straddle promotional and feature content platforms (Gray). A wave of scholars productively explores transmedia storytelling with a focus on storyworlds (Scolari; Harvey), often through the lens of narratology (Ryan; Ryan and Thon). Scolari, Bertetti, and Freeman have drawn together a media archaeological approach and a focus on transmedia characters in an innovative way. We hope to see greater proliferation of focuses and perspectives for the study of transmedia storytelling, including investigations that connect fictional and non-fictional worlds and stories, and a more inclusive variety of life experiences.Conversely, new scholarship on media authorship provides fresh directions, models, methods, and concepts for examining the complexity and messiness of this topic. A growing body of scholarship on the functions of media branding is also productive for reconceptualising notions of authorship in transmedia storytelling (Bourdaa; Dehry Kurtz and Bourdaa). Most notably, A Companion to Media Authorship edited by Gray and Derek Johnson productively interrogates relationships between creative processes, collaborative practices, production cultures, industrial structures, legal frameworks, and theoretical approaches around media authorship. Its case studies begin the work of reimagining of the role of authorship in transmedia, and pave the way for further developments (Burnett; Gordon; Hilmes; Stein). In particular, Matt Hills’s case study of how “counter-authorship” was negotiated on Torchwood (2006-2011) opens up new ways of thinking about multiple authorship and the variety of experiences, contributions, credits, and relationships this encompasses. Johnson’s Media Franchising addresses authorship in a complex way through a focus on social interactions, without making it a defining feature of the form; it would be significant to see a similar scholarly treatment of transmedia. At the very least, scholarly attention might turn its focus away from the very patriarchal activity of discussing definitions among a coterie and, instead, study the process of spreadability of male-centred transmedia storyworlds (Jenkins, Ford, and Green). Given that transmedia is not historically unique to the digital age, scholars might instead study how spreadability changes with the emergence of digitality and convergence, rather than pontificating on definitions of adaptation versus transmedia and cinema versus media.We urge transmedia scholars to distance their work from the malignant gender politics endemic to the media industries and particularly global Hollywood. The confluence of gendered agendas in both academia and media industries works to reinforce patriarchal hierarchies. The humanities should offer independent analysis and critique of how media industries and products function, and should highlight opportunities for conceiving of, creating, and treating such media practices and texts in new ways. As such, it is problematic that discourses on transmedia commonly neglect the distinction between what defines transmediality and what constitutes good examples of transmedia. This blurs the boundaries between description and prescription, taxonomy and hierarchy, analysis and evaluation, and definition and taste. Such discourses blinker us to what we might consider to be transmedia, but also to what examples of “good” transmedia storytelling might look like.Transmedia theory focuses disproportionately on authorship. This restricts a comprehensive understanding of transmedia storytelling, limits the lenses we bring to it, obstructs the ways we evaluate transmedia stories, and impedes how we imagine the possibilities for both media and storytelling. Stories have always been transmedial. What changes with the inception of transmedia theory is that men can claim credit for the stories and for all the work that many people do across various sectors and industries. It is questionable whether authorship is important to transmedia, in which creation is most often collective, loosely planned (at best) and diffused across many people, skill sets, and sectors. While Jenkins’s work has been pivotal in the development of transmedia theory, this is a ripe moment for the diversification of theoretical paradigms for understanding stories in the digital era.ReferencesAlexander, Julia, and Ben Kuchera. “How a Rick and Morty Joke Led to a McDonald’s Szechuan Sauce Controversy.” Polygon 4 Apr. 2017. <https://www.polygon.com/2017/10/12/16464374/rick-and-morty-mcdonalds-szechuan-sauce>.Aristotle. Aristotle's Poetics. New York: Hill and Wang, 1961. Barsanti, Sami. “Dan Harmon Is Pissed at Rick and Morty Fans Harassing Female Writers.” The AV Club 21 Sep. 2017. <https://www.avclub.com/dan-harmon-is-pissed-at-rick-and-morty-fans-for-harassi-1818628816>.Bevan, Alex. “Nostalgia for Pre-Digital Media in Mad Men.” Television & New Media 14.6 (2013): 546-559.Boddy, William. Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1993.Bourdaa, Mélanie. “This Is Not Marketing. 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New York: New York UP, 2007.———. “Devaluing and Revaluing Seriality: The Gendered Discourses of Media Franchising.” Media, Culture & Society, 33.7 (2011): 1077-1093. Kuhn, Annette. “Women’s Genres: Melodrama, Soap Opera and Theory.” In Feminist Television Criticism: A Reader, eds. Charlotte Brunsdon and Lynn Spigel, 225-234. 2nd ed. Maidenhead: Open UP, 2008.Morreale, Joanne. The Dick Van Dyke Show. Detroit, MI: Wayne State UP, 2015.Pearson, Roberta. “Fandom in the Digital Era.” Popular Communication, 8.1 (2010): 84-95. DOI: 10.1080/15405700903502346.Producers Guild of America, The. “Defining Characteristics of Trans-Media Production.” PGA NMC Blog. 2 Oct. 2007. <http://pganmc.blogspot.com.au/2007/10/pga-member-jeff-gomez-left-assembled.html>.Rodham Clinton, Hillary. What Happened. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017.Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Transmedial Storytelling and Transficitonality.” Poetics Today, 34.3 (2013): 361-388. DOI: 10.1215/03335372-2325250. ———, and Jan-Noȅl Thon (eds.). 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Fig. 1: Photo by Miguel Orós, from unsplash.comFeminism has stalled at the bedroom door. In the post-#metoo era, more than ever, we need intimate civil rights in our relationships to counter the worrisome prevailing trends: Intimate partner violence. Interpersonal abuse. Date rape. Sexual harassment. Online harassment. Bullying. Rage. Sexual Assault. Abusive relationships. Revenge porn. There’s a lot of damage done when we get up close and personal. In the 21st century, we have come far in terms of equality and respect between the genders, so there’s a lot to celebrate. We also note that the Australian government has stepped in recently with the theme ‘Keeping Australians safe and secure’, by pledging $78 million to combat domestic violence, much of which takes place behind closed doors (Morrison 2019). Herein lies the issue: while governments legislate to protect victims of domestic violence — out of the public eye, private behaviours cannot be closely monitored, and the lack of social enforcement of these laws threatens the safety of intimate relationships. Rather, individuals are left to their own devices. We outline here a guideline for intimate civility, an individually-embraced code of conduct that could guide interpersonal dynamics within the intimate space of relationships. Civility does not traditionally ‘belong’ in our most intimate relationships. Rather, it’s been presumed, even idealised, that intimacy in our personal lives transcends the need for public values to govern relationships between/among men and women (i.e., that romantic love is all you need). Civility developed as a public, gendered concept. Historically, a man’s home – and indeed, his partner – became his dominion, promoting hegemonic constructions of masculinity, and values that reflect competition, conquest, entitlement and ownership. Moreover, intimate relationships located in the private domain can also be considered for/by both men and women a retreat, a bastion against, or excluded from the controls and demands of the public or ‘polis’ - thus from the public requirement for civility, further enabling its breakdown. The feminist political theorist Carole Pateman situated this historical separation as an inheritance of Hegel’s double dilemma: first, a class division between civil society and the state (between the economic man/woman, or private enterprise and public power) and second, a patriarchal division between the private family (and intimate relationships) and civil society/the state. The private location, she argues, is “an association constituted by ties of love, blood … subjection and particularity” rather than the public sphere, “an association of free and equal individuals” (225). In Hegel’s dilemma, personal liberty is a dualism, only constructed in relation to a governed, public (patriarchal) state. Alternately, Carter depicts civility as a shared moral good, where civility arises not only because of concern over consequences, but also demonstrates our intrinsic moral obligation to respect people in general. This approach subsequently challenges our freedom to carry out private, uncivil acts within a truly civil society.Challenges to Gender EthicsHow can we respond to this challenge in gender ethics? Intimate civility is a term coined by Elizabeth Reid Boyd and Abigail Bray. It came out of their discussions proposing “a new poetics of romance” which called for rewritten codes of interpersonal conduct, an “entente cordiale; a cordial truce to end the sex wars”. Reid Boyd and Bray go further:Politeness is personal and political. We reclaim courtesy as applied sexual and social ethics, an interpersonal, intimate ethics, respectful and tolerant of difference. Gender ethics must be addressed, for they have global social and cultural ramifications that we should not underestimate. (xx)As researchers, we started to explore the idea of intimate civility in interpersonal violence, developing an analysis using social construction and attachment theory simultaneously. In defining the term, we soon realised the concept had wider applications that could change how we think about our most intimate relationships – and how we behave in them. Conceptualising intimate civility involves imagining rights and responsibilities within the private sphere, whether or not loving, familial and natural. Intimate civility can operate through an individually embraced code of conduct to guide interpersonal dynamics within the intimate space of relationships.Gringart, Grobbelaar, and Bender explored the concept of intimate civility by investigating women’s perspectives on what may harmonise their intimate relationships. Women’s most basic desires included safety, equality and respect in the bedroom. In other words, intimate civility is an enactment of human-rights, the embodiment of regard for another human being, insofar as it is a form of ensuring physical and mental integrity, life, safety and protection of all beings. Thus, if intimate civility existed as a core facet of each individual’s self-concept, the manifestation of intimate partner violence ideally would not occur. Rage, from an intimate civility perspective, rips through any civil response and generates misconduct towards another. When we hold respect for others as equal moral beings, civility is key to contain conflicts, which prevents the escalation of disagreements into rage. Intimate civility proposes that civility becomes the baseline behaviour that would be reciprocated between two individuals within the private domain of intimate relationships. Following this notion, intimate civility is the foremost casualty in many relationships characterised by intimate partner violence. The current criminalisation of intimate partner violence leaves unexplored the previously privatised property of the relational – including the inheritance of centuries of control of women’s bodies and sexuality – and how far, in this domain, notions of civility might liberate and/or oppress. The feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray argues that these kinds of ‘sexuate rights’ must apply to both men and women and the reality of their needs and desires. Equality, she argued, could not be achieved without a rewriting of the rights and obligations of each sex, qua different, in social rights and obligations (Yan).Synonyms for intimacy include, amongst others, closeness, attachment, togetherness, warmth, mutual affection, familiarity and privacy. Indirectly, sexual relations are also often synonymous with intimate relationships. However, sex is not intimacy, as both sex and intimacy both exist without the other. Bowlby proposed that throughout our lives we are attentive to the responsiveness and the availability of those that we are attached to, and suggested that “intimate attachments to other human beings are the hub around which a person’s life revolves, not only when he is an infant or a toddler, but throughout his adolescence and his years of maturity as well, and on into old age” (442). Although love is not by nature reciprocal, in intimacy we seek reciprocity – to love one another at the same time in a shared form of commitment. Kierkegaard hypothesised that genuine love is witnessed by one continuing to love another after their death as it obviates any doubt that the beloved was loved and was not merely instrumental (Soble).Intimate Civility as a Starting PointCivility includes qualities such as trust, duty, morality, sacrifice, self-restraint, respect, and fairness; a common standard allowing individuals to work, live and associate together. Intimacy encourages caring, loyalty, empathy, honesty, and self-knowledge. Thus, intimate civility should begin with those closest to us; being civil in our most intimate relationships. It advocates the genuine use of terms of endearment, not terms of abuse. We can only develop qualities such as morality and empathy, crucial for intimate relationships, if we have experienced secure, intimate relationships. Individuals reared in homes devoid of intimate civility will be challenged to identify and promote the interest or wellbeing of their intimate counterparts, and have to seek outside help to learn these skills: it is a learnt behaviour, both at an interpersonal and societal level. Individuals whose parents were insensitive to their childhood needs, and were unable to perceive, interpret and respond appropriately to their subtle communications, signals, wishes and mood will be flailing in this interpersonal skill (Holmes and Slade). Similarly, the individual’s inclusion in a civil society will only be achieved if their surrounding environment promotes and values virtues such as compassion, fairness and cooperation. This may be a challenging task. We envisage intimate civility as a starting point. It provides a focus to discuss and explore civil rights, obligations and responsibilities, between and among women and men in their personal relationships. As stated above, intimate civility begins with one's relationship with oneself and the closest relationships in the home, and hopefully reaches outwards to all kinds of relationships, including same sex, transgender, and other roles within non-specific gender assignment. Therefore, exploring the concept of intimate civility has applications in personal therapy, family counselling centres and relationship counselling environments, or schools in sexual education, or in universities promoting student safety. For example, the 2019 “Change the Course” report was recently released to augment Universities Australia’s 2016 campaign that raised awareness on sexual assault on campus. While it is still under development, we envision that intimate civility decalogue outlined here could become a checklist to assist in promoting awareness regarding abuse of power and gender roles. A recent example of cultural reframing of gender and power in intimate relationships is the Australian Government’s 2018 Respect campaign against gender violence. These recent campaigns promote awareness that intimate civility is integrated with a more functional society.These campaigns, as the images demonstrate, aim at quantifying connections between interactions on an intimate scale in individual lives, and their impacts in shaping civil society in the arena of gender violence. They highlight the elasticity of the bonds between intimate life and civil society and our collective responsibility as citizens for reworking both the gendered and personal civility. Fig. 2: Photo by Tyler Nix: Hands Spelling Out LOVE, from unsplash.comThe Decalogue of Intimate Civility Overall, police reports of domestic violence are heavily skewed towards male on female, but this is not always the case. The Australian government recently reported that “1 in 6 Australian women and 1 in 16 men have been subjected, since the age of 15, to physical and/or sexual violence by a current or previous cohabiting partner” (Australian Institutes of Health and Welfare). Rather than reiterating the numbers, we envisage the decalogue (below) as a checklist of concepts designed to discuss and explore rights, obligations and responsibilities, between and among both partners in their intimate relationships. As such, this decalogue forms a basis for conversation. Intimate civility involves a relationship with these ten qualities, with ourselves, and each other.1) Intimate civility is personal and political. Conceptualising intimate civility involves imagining rights and responsibilities within the private sphere. It is not an impingement on individual liberty or privacy but a guarantor of it. Civil society requires us not to defend private infringements of inter-personal respect. Private behaviours are both intimate in their performance and the springboard for social norms. In Geoffrey Rush’s recent defamation case his defence relied not on denying claims he repeatedly touched his fellow actor’s genitalia during their stage performance in a specific scene, despite her requests to him that he stop, but rather on how newspaper reporting of her statements made him out to be a “sexual pervert”, reflecting the complex link between this ‘private’ interaction between two people and its very public exposé (Wells). 2) Intimate civility is an enactment of a civil right, insofar as it is a form of ensuring physical and mental integrity, life, safety and protection. Intimate civility should begin with those closest to us. An example of this ethic at work is the widening scope of criminalisation of intimate partner abuse to include all forms of abusive interactions between people. Stalking and the pre-cursors to physical violence such as controlling behaviours, online bullying or any actions used to instil fear or insecurity in a partner, are accorded legal sanctions. 3) Intimate civility is polite. Politeness is more than manners. It relates to our public codes of conduct, to behaviours and laws befitting every civilian of the ‘polis’. It includes the many acts of politeness that are required behind closed doors and the recognition that this is the place from which public civility emerges. For example, the modern parent may hope that what they sanction as “polite” behaviour between siblings at home might then become generalised by the child into their public habits and later moral expectations as adults. In an ideal society, the micro-politics of family life become the blueprint for moral development for adult expectations about personal conduct in intimate and public life.4) Intimate civility is equitable. It follows Luce Irigaray’s call for ‘sexuate rights’ designed to apply to men and women and the reality of their needs and desires, in a rewriting of the social rights and obligations of each sex (Yan and Irigaray). Intimate civility extends this notion of rights to include all those involved in personal relations. This principle is alive within systemic family therapy which assumes that while not all members of the family system are always able to exert equal impacts or influence, they each in principle are interdependent participants influencing the system as a whole (Dallos and Draper). 5) Intimate civility is dialectical. The separation of intimacy and civility in Western society and thought is itself a dualism that rests upon other dualisms: public/private, constructed/natural, male/female, rational/emotional, civil/criminal, individual/social, victim/oppressor. Romantic love is not a natural state or concept, and does not help us to develop safe governance in the world of intimate relationships. Instead, we envisage intimate civility – and our relationships – as dynamic, dialectical, discursive and interactive, above and beyond dualism. Just as individuals do not assume that consent for sexual activity negotiated in one partnership under a set of particular conditions, is consent to sexual activity in all partnerships in any conditions. So, dialectics of intimate civility raises the expectation that what occurs in interpersonal relationships is worked out incrementally, between people over time and particular to their situation and experiences. 6) Intimate civility is humane. It can be situated in what Julia Kristeva refers to as the new humanism, emerging (and much needed) today. “This new humanism, interaction with others – all the others – socially marginalised, racially discriminated, politically, sexually, biologically or psychically persecuted others” (Kristeva, 2016: 64) is only possible if we immerse ourselves in the imaginary, in the experience of ‘the other’. Intimate civility takes on a global meaning when human rights action groups such as Amnesty International address the concerns of individuals to make a social difference. Such organisations develop globally-based digital platforms for interested individuals to become active about shared social concerns, understanding that the new humanism ethic works within and between individuals and can be harnessed for change.7) Intimate civility is empathic. It invites us to create not-yet-said, not-yet-imagined relationships. The creative space for intimate civility is not bound by gender, race or sexuality – only by our imaginations. “The great instrument of moral good is the imagination,” wrote the poet Shelley in 1840. Moral imagination (Reid Boyd) helps us to create better ways of being. It is a form of empathy that encourages us to be kinder and more loving to ourselves and each other, when we imagine how others might feel. The use of empathic imagination for real world relational benefits is common in traditional therapeutic practices, such as mindfulness, that encourages those struggling with self compassion to imagine the presence of a kind friend or ally to support them at times of hardship. 8) Intimate civility is respectful. Intimate civility is the foremost casualty in many relationships characterised by forms of abuse and intimate partner violence. “Respect”, wrote Simone Weil, “is due to the human being as such, and is not a matter of degree” (171). In the intimate civility ethic this quality of respect accorded as a right of beings is mutual, including ourselves with the other. When respect is eroded, much is lost. Respect arises from empathy through attuned listening. The RESPECT! Campaign originating from the Futures without Violence organisation assumes healthy relationships begin with listening between people. They promote the understanding that the core foundation of human wellbeing is relational, requiring inter-personal understanding and respect.9) Intimate civility is a form of highest regard. When we regard another we truly see them. To hold someone in high regard is to esteem them, to hold them above others, not putting them on a pedestal, or insisting they are superior, but to value them for who they are. To be esteemed for our interior, for our character, rather than what we display or what we own. It connects with the humanistic psychological concept of unconditional positive regard. The highest regard holds each other in arms and in mind. It is to see/look at, to have consideration for, and to pay attention to, recently epitomised by the campaign against human trafficking, “Can You See Me?” (Human Trafficking), whose purpose is to foster public awareness of the non-verbal signs and signals between individuals that indicate human trafficking may be taking place. In essence, teaching communal awareness towards the victimisation of individuals. 10) Intimate civility is intergenerational. We can only develop qualities such as morality and empathy, crucial for intimate relationships, if we have experienced (or imagined) intimate relationships where these qualities exist. Individuals reared in homes devoid of intimate civility could be challenged to identify and promote the interest or wellbeing of their intimate counterparts; it is a learnt behaviour, both at an interpersonal and societal level. Childhood developmental trauma research (Spinazzola and Ford) reminds us that the interaction of experiences, relational interactions, contexts and even our genetic amkeup makes individuals both vulnerable to repeating the behaviour of past generations. However, treatment of the condition and surrounding individuals with people in their intimate world who have different life experiences and personal histories, i.e., those who have acquired respectful relationship habits, can have a positive impact on the individuals’ capacity to change their learned negative behaviours. In conclusion, the work on intimate civility as a potential concept to alleviate rage in human relationships has hardly begun. The decalogue provides a checklist that indicates the necessity of ‘intersectionality’ — where the concepts of intimate civility connect to many points within the public/private and personal/political domains. Any analysis of intimacy must reach further than prepositions tied to social construction and attachment theory (Fonagy), to include current understandings of trauma and inter-generational violence and the way these influence people’s ability to act in healthy and balanced interpersonal relationships. While not condoning violent acts, locating the challenges to intimate civility on both personal and societal levels may leverage a compassionate view of those caught up in interpersonal violence. The human condition demands that we continue the struggle to meet the challenges of intimate civility in our personal actions with others as well as the need to replicate civil behaviour throughout all societies. ReferencesBowlby, John. Attachment and Loss. Vol. 3. New York: Basic Books, 1980.Carter, Stephen. Civility: Manners, Morals and the Etiquette of Democracy. New York: Basic Books, 1998.Dallos, Rudi, and Ros Draper. An Introduction to Family Therapy: Systemic Theory and Practice. 2nd ed. Open University Press: Berkshire, 2005.Australian Institutes of Health and Welfare, Australian Government. Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence in Australia. 2018. 6 Feb. 2019 <https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/domestic-violence/family-domestic-sexual-violence-in-australia-2018/contents/summary>. Fonagy, Peter. Attachment Theory and Psychoanalysis. New York: Other Press, 2001.Gringart, Eyal, Madalena Grobbelaar, and Alise Bender. Intimate Civility: The Perceptions and Experiences of Women on Harmonising Intimate Relationships. Honours thesis, 2018.Holmes, Jeremy, and Arietta Slade. Attachment in Therapeutic Practice. Los Angeles: Sage, 2018. Human Trafficking, Jan. 2019. 14 Feb. 2019 <https://www.a21.org/content/can-you-see-me/gnsqqg?permcode=gnsqqg&site=true>.Kristeva, Julia. Teresa My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila. New York: Columbia UP, 2016.Morrison, Scott. “National Press Club Address.” 11 Feb. 2019. 26 Feb. 2019 <https://www.pm.gov.au/media/national-press-club-address-our-plan-keeping-australians-safe-and-secure>.Pateman, Carole. “The Patriarchal Welfare State.” Defining Women: Social Institutions and Gender Divisions. Eds. Linda McDowell and Rosemary Pringle. London: Polity Press, 1994. 223-45.Reid Boyd, Elizabeth. “How Creativity Can Help Us Cultivate Moral Imagination.” The Conversation, 30 Jan. 2019. 11 Feb. 2019 <http://theconversation.com/how-creativity-can-help-us-cultivate-moral-imagination-101968>.Reid Boyd, Elizabeth, and Abigail Bray. Ladies and Gentlemen: Sex, Love and 21st Century Courtesy. Unpublished book proposal, 2005.Commonwealth of Australia. Respect Campaign. 2018, 9 Jan. 2019 <http://www.respect.gov.au/the-campaign/campaign-materials/>.Shelley, Percy Bysshe. A Defence of Poetry. London: Ginn and Company, 1840.Soble, Alan. Philosophy of Sex and Love. St Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1998.Weil, Simone. Waiting on God. London: Fontana Collins, 1968.Wells, Jamelle. “Geoffrey Rush, Erin Norvill and the Daily Telegraph: The Stakes Are High in This Defamation Trial.” ABC News 12 Nov. 2018. 23 Feb. 2019 <http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-10/geoffrey-rush-defamation-trial-a-drama-with-final-act-to-come/10483944>.Yan, Liu, and Luce Irigaray. “Feminism, Sexuate Rights and the Ethics of Sexual Difference: An Interview with Luce Irigaray.” Foreign Literature Studies (2010): 1-9.

As the ball dropped on 1999, is it any wonder that No Doubt played, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” by R.E.M. live on MTV? Any discussion of the Nineties—and its pinnacle moment, Y2K—requires a discussion of both the cover and the glitch, two performative and technological enactments that fomented the collapse between author-reader and user-machine that has, twenty years later, become normalised in today’s Post Internet culture. By staging failure and inviting the audience to participate, the glitch and the cover call into question the original and the origin story. This breakdown of normative borders has prompted the convergence of previously demarcated media, genres, and cultures, a constellation from which to recognise a stochastic hybrid form. The Cover as a Revelation of Collaborative MurmurBefore Sean Parker collaborated with Shawn Fanning to launch Napster on 1 June 1999, networked file distribution existed as cumbersome text-based programs like Internet Relay Chat and Usenet, servers which resembled bulletin boards comprising multiple categories of digitally ripped files. Napster’s simple interface, its advanced search filters, and its focus on music and audio files fostered a peer-to-peer network that became the fastest growing website in history, registering 80 million users in less than two years.In harnessing the transgressive power of the Internet to force a new mode of content sharing, Napster forced traditional providers to rethink what constitutes “content” at a moment which prefigures our current phenomena of “produsage” (Bruns) and the vast popularity of user-generated content. At stake is not just the democratisation of art but troubling the very idea of intellectual property, which is to say, the very concept of ownership.Long before the Internet was re-routed from military servers and then mainstreamed, Michel Foucault understood the efficacy of anonymous interactions on the level of literature, imagining a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author. But what he was asking in 1969 is something we can better answer today, because it seems less germane to call into question the need for an author in a culture in which everyone is writing, producing, and reproducing text, and more effective to think about re-evaluating the notion of a single author, or what it means to write by yourself. One would have to testify to the particular medium we have at our disposal, the Internet’s ultimate permissibility, its provocations for collaboration and co-creation. One would have to surrender the idea that authors own anything besides our will to keep producing, and our desire for change; and to modulate means to resist without negating, to alter without omitting, to enable something new to come forward; the unfolding of the text into the anonymity of a murmur.We should remind ourselves that “to author” all the way down to its Latin roots signifies advising, witnessing, and transferring. We should be reminded that to author something means to forget the act of saying “I,” to forget it or to make it recede in the background in service of the other or others, on behalf of a community. The de-centralisation of Web development and programming initiated by Napster inform a poetics of relation, an always-open structure in which, as Édouard Glissant said, “the creator of a text is effaced, or rather, is done away with, to be revealed in the texture of his creation” (25). When a solid melts, it reveals something always underneath, something at the bottom, something inside—something new and something that was always already there. A cover, too, is both a revival and a reworking, an update and an interpretation, a retrospective tribute and a re-version that looks toward the future. In performing the new, the original as singular is called into question, replaced by an increasingly fetishised copy made up of and made by multiples.Authorial Effacement and the Exigency of the ErrorY2K, otherwise known as the Millennium Bug, was a coding problem, an abbreviation made to save memory space which would disrupt computers during the transition from 1999 to 2000, when it was feared that the new year would become literally unrecognisable. After an estimated $300 billion in upgraded hardware and software was spent to make computers Y2K-compliant, something more extraordinary than global network collapse occurred as midnight struck: nothing.But what if the machine admits the possibility of accident? Implicit in the admission of any accident is the disclosure of a new condition—something to be heard, to happen, from the Greek ad-cadere, which means to fall. In this drop into non-repetition, the glitch actualises an idea about authorship that necessitates multi-user collaboration; the curtain falls only to reveal the hidden face of technology, which becomes, ultimately, instructions for its re-programming. And even as it deviates, the new form is liable to become mainstreamed into a new fashion. “Glitch’s inherently critical moment(um)” (Menkman 8) indicates this potential for technological self-insurgence, while suggesting the broader cultural collapse of generic markers and hierarchies, and its ensuing flow into authorial fluidity.This feeling of shock, this move “towards the ruins of destructed meaning” (Menkman 29) inherent in any encounter with the glitch, forecasted not the immediate horror of Y2K, but the delayed disasters of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, Indian Ocean tsunami, Sichuan Province earthquake, global financial crisis, and two international wars that would all follow within the next nine years. If, as Menkman asserts, the glitch, in representing a loss of self-control “captures the machine revealing itself” (30), what also surfaces is the tipping point that edges us toward a new becoming—not only the inevitability of surrender between machine and user, but their reversibility. Just as crowds stood, transfixed before midnight of the new millennium in anticipation of the error, or its exigency, it’s always the glitch I wait for; it’s always the glitch I aim to re-create, as if on command. The accidental revelation, or the machine breaking through to show us its insides. Like the P2P network that Napster introduced to culture, every glitch produces feedback, a category of noise (Shannon) influencing the machine’s future behaviour whereby potential users might return the transmission.Re-Orienting the Bizarre in Fantasy and FictionIt is in the fantasy of dreams, and their residual leakage into everyday life, evidenced so often in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, where we can locate a similar authorial agency. The cult Nineties psycho-noir, and its discontinuous return twenty-six years later, provoke us into reconsidering the science of sleep as the art of fiction, assembling an alternative, interactive discourse from found material.The turning in and turning into in dreams is often described as an encounter with the “bizarre,” a word which indicates our lack of understanding about the peculiar processes that normally happen inside our heads. Dreams are inherently and primarily bizarre, Allan J. Hobson argues, because during REM sleep, our noradrenergic and serotonergic systems do not modulate the activated brain, as they do in waking. “The cerebral cortex and hippocampus cannot function in their usual oriented and linear logical way,” Hobson writes, “but instead create odd and remote associations” (71). But is it, in fact, that our dreams are “bizarre” or is it that the model itself is faulty—a precept premised on the normative, its dependency upon generalisation and reducibility—what is bizarre if not the ordinary modulations that occur in everyday life?Recall Foucault’s interest not in what a dream means but what a dream does. How it rematerialises in the waking world and its basis in and effect on imagination. Recall recollection itself, or Erin J. Wamsley’s “Dreaming and Offline Memory Consolidation.” “A ‘function’ for dreaming,” Wamsley writes, “hinges on the difficult question of whether conscious experience in general serves any function” (433). And to think about the dream as a specific mode of experience related to a specific theory of knowledge is to think about a specific form of revelation. It is this revelation, this becoming or coming-to-be, that makes the connection to crowd-sourced content production explicit—dreams serve as an audition or dress rehearsal in which new learning experiences with others are incorporated into the unconscious so that they might be used for production in the waking world. Bert O. States elaborates, linking the function of the dream with the function of the fiction writer “who makes models of the world that carry the imprint and structure of our various concerns. And it does this by using real people, or ‘scraps’ of other people, as the instruments of hypothetical facts” (28). Four out of ten characters in a dream are strangers, according to Calvin Hall, who is himself a stranger, someone I’ve never met in waking life or in a dream. But now that I’ve read him, now that I’ve written him into this work, he seems closer to me. Twin Peak’s serial lesson for viewers is this—even the people who seem strangers to us can interact with and intervene in our processes of production.These are the moments that a beginning takes place. And even if nothing directly follows, this transfer constitutes the hypothesised moment of production, an always-already perhaps, the what-if stimulus of charged possibility; the soil plot, or plot line, for freedom. Twin Peaks is a town in which the bizarre penetrates the everyday so often that eventually, the bizarre is no longer bizarre, but just another encounter with the ordinary. Dream sequences are common, but even more common—and more significant—are the moments in which what might otherwise be a dream vision ruptures into real life; these moments propel the narrative.Exhibit A: A man who hasn’t gone outside in a while begins to crumble, falling to the earth when forced to chase after a young girl, who’s just stolen the secret journal of another young girl, which he, in turn, had stolen.B: A horse appears in the middle of the living room after a routine vacuum cleaning and a subtle barely-there transition, a fade-out into a fade-in, what people call a dissolve. No one notices, or thinks to point out its presence. Or maybe they’re distracted. Or maybe they’ve already forgotten. Dissolve.(I keep hitting “Save As.” As if renaming something can also transform it.)C: All the guests at the Great Northern Hotel begin to dance the tango on cue—a musical, without any music.D: After an accident, a middle-aged woman with an eye patch—she was wearing the eye patch before the accident—believes she’s seventeen again. She enrolls in Twin Peaks High School and joins the cheerleading team.E: A woman pretending to be a Japanese businessman ambles into the town bar to meet her estranged husband, who fails to recognise his cross-dressing, race-swapping wife.F: A girl with blond hair is murdered, only to come back as another girl, with the same face and a different name. And brown hair. They’re cousins.G: After taking over her dead best friend’s Meals on Wheels route, Donna Hayward walks in to meet a boy wearing a tuxedo, sitting on the couch with his fingers clasped: a magician-in-training. “Sometimes things can happen just like this,” he says with a snap while the camera cuts to his grandmother, bed-ridden, and the appearance of a plate of creamed corn that vanishes as soon as she announces its name.H: A woman named Margaret talks to and through a log. The log, cradled in her arms wherever she goes, becomes a key witness.I: After a seven-minute diegetic dream sequence, which includes a one-armed man, a dwarf, a waltz, a dead girl, a dialogue played backward, and a significantly aged representation of the dreamer, Agent Cooper wakes up and drastically shifts his investigation of a mysterious small-town murder. The dream gives him agency; it turns him from a detective staring at a dead-end to one with a map of clues. The next day, it makes him a storyteller; all the others, sitting tableside in the middle of the woods become a captive audience. They become readers. They read into his dream to create their own scenarios. Exhibit I. The cycle of imagination spins on.Images re-direct and obfuscate meaning, a process of over-determination which Foucault says results in “a multiplication of meanings which override and contradict each other” (DAE 34). In the absence of image, the process of imagination prevails. In the absence of story, real drama in our conscious life, we form complex narratives in our sleep—our imaginative unconscious. Sometimes they leak out, become stories in our waking life, if we think to compose them.“A bargain has been struck,” says Harold, an under-5 bit player, later, in an episode called “Laura’s Secret Diary.” So that she might have the chance to read Laura Palmer’s diary, Donna Hayward agrees to talk about her own life, giving Harold the opportunity to write it down in his notebook: his “living novel” the new chapter which reads, after uncapping his pen and smiling, “Donna Hayward.”He flips to the front page and sets a book weight to keep the page in place. He looks over at Donna sheepishly. “Begin.”Donna begins talking about where she was born, the particulars of her father—the lone town doctor—before she interrupts the script and asks her interviewer about his origin story. Not used to people asking him the questions, Harold’s mouth drops and he stops writing. He puts his free hand to his chest and clears his throat. (The ambient, wind-chime soundtrack intensifies.) “I grew up in Boston,” he finally volunteers. “Well, actually, I grew up in books.”He turns his head from Donna to the notebook, writing feverishly, as if he’s begun to write his own responses as the camera cuts back to his subject, Donna, crossing her legs with both hands cupped at her exposed knee, leaning in to tell him: “There’s things you can’t get in books.”“There’s things you can’t get anywhere,” he returns, pen still in his hand. “When we dream, they can be found in other people.”What is a call to composition if not a call for a response? It is always the audience which makes a work of art, re-framed in our own image, the same way we re-orient ourselves in a dream to negotiate its “inconsistencies.” Bizarreness is merely a consequence of linguistic limitations, the overwhelming sensory dream experience which can only be re-framed via a visual representation. And so the relationship between the experience of reading and dreaming is made explicit when we consider the associations internalised in the reader/audience when ingesting a passage of words on a page or on the stage, objects that become mental images and concept pictures, a lens of perception that we may liken to another art form: the film, with its jump-cuts and dissolves, so much like the defamiliarising and dislocating experience of dreaming, especially for the dreamer who wakes. What else to do in that moment but write about it?Evidence of the bizarre in dreams is only the evidence of the capacity of our human consciousness at work in the unconscious; the moment in which imagination and memory come together to create another reality, a spectrum of reality that doesn’t posit a binary between waking and sleeping, a spectrum of reality that revels in the moments where the two coalesce, merge, cross-pollinate—and what action glides forward in its wake? Sustained un-hesitation and the wish to stay inside one’s self. To be conscious of the world outside the dream means the end of one. To see one’s face in the act of dreaming would require the same act of obliteration. Recognition of the other, and of the self, prevents the process from being fulfilled. Creative production and dreaming, like voyeurism, depend on this same lack of recognition, or the recognition of yourself as other. What else is a dream if not a moment of becoming, of substituting or sublimating yourself for someone else?We are asked to relate a recent dream or we volunteer an account, to a friend or lover. We use the word “seem” in nearly every description, when we add it up or how we fail to. Everything seems to be a certain way. It’s not a place but a feeling. James, another character on Twin Peaks, says the same thing, after someone asks him, “Where do you want to go?” but before he hops on his motorcycle and rides off into the unknowable future outside the frame. Everything seems like something else, based on our own associations, our own knowledge of people and things. Offline memory consolidation. Seeming and semblance. An uncertainty of appearing—both happening and seeing. How we mediate—and re-materialise—the dream through text is our attempt to re-capture imagination, to leave off the image and better become it. If, as Foucault says, the dream is always a dream of death, its purpose is a call to creation.Outside of dreams, something bizarre occurs. We call it novelty or news. We might even bestow it with fame. A man gets on the wrong plane and ends up halfway across the world. A movie is made into the moment of his misfortune. Years later, in real life and in movie time, an Iranian refugee can’t even get on the plane; he is turned away by UK immigration officials at Charles de Gaulle, so he spends the next sixteen years living in the airport lounge; when he departs in real life, the movie (The Terminal, 2004) arrives in theaters. Did it take sixteen years to film the terminal exile? How bizarre, how bizarre. OMC’s eponymous refrain of the 1996 one-hit wonder, which is another way of saying, an anomaly.When all things are counted and countable in today’s algorithmic-rich culture, deviance becomes less of a statistical glitch and more of a testament to human peculiarity; the repressed idiosyncrasies of man before machine but especially the fallible tendencies of mankind within machines—the non-repetition of chance that the Nineties emblematised in the form of its final act. The point is to imagine what comes next; to remember waiting together for the end of the world. There is no need to even open your eyes to see it. It is just a feeling. ReferencesBruns, Axel. “Towards Produsage: Futures for User-Led Content Production.” Cultural Attitudes towards Technology and Communication 2006: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference, eds. Fay Sudweeks, Herbert Hrachovec, and Charles Ess. Murdoch: School of Information Technology, 2006. 275-84. <https://eprints.qut.edu.au/4863/1/4863_1.pdf>.Foucault, Michel. “Dream, Imagination and Existence.” Dream and Existence. Ed. Keith Hoeller. Pittsburgh: Review of Existential Psychology & Psychiatry, 1986. 31-78.———. “What Is an Author?” The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought. Ed. Paul Rainbow. New York: Penguin, 1991.Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997.Hall, Calvin S. The Meaning of Dreams. New York: McGraw Hill, 1966.Hobson, J. Allan. The Dream Drugstore: Chemically Altered State of Conscious­ness. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001.Menkman, Rosa. The Glitch Moment(um). Amsterdam: Network Notebooks, 2011.Shannon, Claude Elwood. “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” The Bell System Technical Journal 27 (1948): 379-423.States, Bert O. “Bizarreness in Dreams and Other Fictions.” The Dream and the Text: Essays on Literature and Language. Ed. Carol Schreier Rupprecht. Albany: SUNY P, 1993.Twin Peaks. Dir. David Lynch. ABC and Showtime. 1990-3 & 2017. Wamsley, Erin. “Dreaming and Offline Memory Consolidation.” Current Neurology and Neuroscience Reports 14.3 (2014): 433. “Y2K Bug.” Encyclopedia Britannica. 18 July 2018. <https://www.britannica.com/technology/Y2K-bug>.

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>.

In 1956, John Cage predicted that “in the future, records will be made from records” (Duffel, 202). Certainly, musical creativity has always involved a certain amount of appropriation and adaptation of previous works. For example, Vivaldi appropriated and adapted the “Cum sancto spiritu” fugue of Ruggieri’s Gloria (Burnett, 4; Forbes, 261). If stuck for a guitar solo on stage, Keith Richards admits that he’ll adapt Buddy Holly for his own purposes (Street, 135). Similarly, Nirvana adapted the opening riff from Killing Jokes’ “Eighties” for their song “Come as You Are”. Musical “quotation” is actively encouraged in jazz, and contemporary hip-hop would not exist if the genre’s pioneers and progenitors had not plundered and adapted existing recorded music. Sampling technologies, however, have taken musical adaptation a step further and realised Cage’s prediction. Hardware and software samplers have developed to the stage where any piece of audio can be appropriated and adapted to suit the creative impulses of the sampling musician (or samplist). The practice of sampling challenges established notions of creativity, with whole albums created with no original musical input as most would understand it—literally “records made from records.” Sample-based music is premised on adapting audio plundered from the cultural environment. This paper explores the ways in which technology is used to adapt previous recordings into new ones, and how musicians themselves have adapted to the potentials of digital technology for exploring alternative approaches to musical creativity. Sampling is frequently defined as “the process of converting an analog signal to a digital format.” While this definition remains true, it does not acknowledge the prevalence of digital media. The “analogue to digital” method of sampling requires a microphone or instrument to be recorded directly into a sampler. Digital media, however, simplifies the process. For example, a samplist can download a video from YouTube and rip the audio track for editing, slicing, and manipulation, all using software within the noiseless digital environment of the computer. Perhaps it is more prudent to describe sampling simply as the process of capturing sound. Regardless of the process, once a sound is loaded into a sampler (hardware or software) it can be replayed using a MIDI keyboard, trigger pad or sequencer. Use of the sampled sound, however, need not be a faithful rendition or clone of the original. At the most basic level of manipulation, the duration and pitch of sounds can be altered. The digital processes that are implemented into the Roland VariOS Phrase Sampler allow samplists to eliminate the pitch or melodic quality of a sampled phrase. The phrase can then be melodically redefined as the samplist sees fit: adapted to a new tempo, key signature, and context or genre. Similarly, software such as Propellerhead’s ReCycle slices drum beats into individual hits for use with a loop sampler such as Reason’s Dr Rex module. Once loaded into Dr Rex, the individual original drum sounds can be used to program a new beat divorced from the syncopation of the original drum beat. Further, the individual slices can be subjected to pitch, envelope (a component that shapes the volume of the sound over time) and filter (a component that emphasises and suppresses certain frequencies) control, thus an existing drum beat can easily be adapted to play a new rhythm at any tempo. For example, this rhythm was created from slicing up and rearranging Clyde Stubblefield’s classic break from James Brown’s “Funky Drummer”. Sonic adaptation of digital information is not necessarily confined to the auditory realm. An audio editor such as Sony’s Sound Forge is able to open any file format as raw audio. For example, a Word document or a Flash file could be opened with the data interpreted as audio. Admittedly, the majority of results obtained are harsh white noise, but there is scope for serendipitous anomalies such as a glitchy beat that can be extracted and further manipulated by audio software. Audiopaint is an additive synthesis application created by Nicolas Fournel for converting digital images into audio. Each pixel position and colour is translated into information designating frequency (pitch), amplitude (volume) and pan position in the stereo image. The user can determine which one of the three RGB channels corresponds to either of the stereo channels. Further, the oscillator for the wave form can be either the default sine wave or an existing audio file such as a drum loop can be used. The oscillator shapes the end result, responding to the dynamics of the sine wave or the audio file. Although Audiopaint labours under the same caveat as with the use of raw audio, the software can produce some interesting results. Both approaches to sound generation present results that challenge distinctions between “musical sound” and “noise”. Sampling is also a cultural practice, a relatively recent form of adaptation extending out of a time honoured creative aesthetic that borrows, quotes and appropriates from existing works to create new ones. Different fields of production, as well as different commentators, variously use terms such as “co-creative media”, “cumulative authorship”, and “derivative works” with regard to creations that to one extent or another utilise existing works in the production of new ones (Coombe; Morris; Woodmansee). The extent of the sampling may range from subtle influence to dominating significance within the new work, but the constant principle remains: an existing work is appropriated and adapted to fit the needs of the secondary creator. Proponents of what may be broadly referred to as the “free culture” movement argue that creativity and innovation inherently relies on the appropriation and adaptation of existing works (for example, see Lessig, Future of Ideas; Lessig, Free Culture; McLeod, Freedom of Expression; Vaidhyanathan). For example, Gwen Stefani’s 2004 release “Rich Girl” is based on Louchie Lou and Michie One’s 1994 single of the same title. Lou and One’s “Rich Girl”, in turn, is a reggae dance hall adaptation of “If I Were a Rich Man” from Fiddler on the Roof. Stefani’s “na na na” vocal riff shares the same melody as the “Ya ha deedle deedle, bubba bubba deedle deedle dum” riff from Fiddler on the Roof. Samantha Mumba adapted David Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes” for her second single “Body II Body”. Similarly, Richard X adapted Tubeway Army’s “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?’ and Adina Howard’s “Freak Like Me” for a career saving single for Sugababes. Digital technologies enable and even promote the adaptation of existing works (Morris). The ease of appropriating and manipulating digital audio files has given rise to a form of music known variously as mash-up, bootleg, or bastard pop. Mash-ups are the most recent stage in a history of musical appropriation and they epitomise the sampling aesthetic. Typically produced in bedroom computer-based studios, mash-up artists use software such as Acid or Cool Edit Pro to cut up digital music files and reassemble the fragments to create new songs, arbitrarily adding self-composed parts if desired. Comprised almost exclusively from sections of captured music, mash-ups have been referred to as “fictional pop music” because they conjure up scenarios where, for example, Destiny’s Child jams in a Seattle garage with Nirvana or the Spice Girls perform with Nine Inch Nails (Petridis). Once the initial humour of the novelty has passed, the results can be deeply alluring. Mash-ups extract the distinctive characteristics of songs and place them in new, innovative contexts. As Dale Lawrence writes: “the vocals are often taken from largely reviled or ignored sources—cornball acts like Aguilera or Destiny’s Child—and recast in wildly unlikely contexts … where against all odds, they actually work”. Similarly, Crawford argues that “part of the art is to combine the greatest possible aesthetic dissonance with the maximum musical harmony. The pleasure for listeners is in discovering unlikely artistic complementarities and revisiting their musical memories in mutated forms” (36). Sometimes the adaptation works in the favour of the sampled artist: George Clinton claims that because of sampling he is more popular now than in 1976—“the sampling made us big again” (Green). The creative aspect of mash-ups is unlike that usually associated with musical composition and has more in common with DJing. In an effort to further clarify this aspect, we may regard DJ mixes as “mash-ups on the fly.” When Grandmaster Flash recorded his quilt-pop masterpiece, “Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel,” it was recorded while he performed live, demonstrating his precision and skill with turntables. Modern audio editing software facilitates the capture and storage of sound, allowing mash-up artists to manipulate sounds bytes outside of “real-time” and the live performance parameters within which Flash worked. Thus, the creative element is not the traditional arrangement of chords and parts, but rather “audio contexts”. If, as Riley pessimistically suggests, “there are no new chords to be played, there are no new song structures to be developed, there are no new stories to be told, and there are no new themes to explore,” then perhaps it is understandable that artists have searched for new forms of musical creativity. The notes and chords of mash-ups are segments of existing works sequenced together to produce inter-layered contexts rather than purely tonal patterns. The merit of mash-up culture lies in its function of deconstructing the boundaries of genre and providing new musical possibilities. The process of mashing-up genres functions to critique contemporary music culture by “pointing a finger at how stifled and obvious the current musical landscape has become. … Suddenly rap doesn’t have to be set to predictable funk beats, pop/R&B ballads don’t have to come wrapped in cheese, garage melodies don’t have to recycle the Ramones” (Lawrence). According to Theodor Adorno, the Frankfurt School critic, popular music (of his time) was irretrievably simplistic and constructed from easily interchangeable, modular components (McLeod, “Confessions”, 86). A standardised and repetitive approach to musical composition fosters a mode of consumption dubbed by Adorno “quotation listening” and characterised by passive acceptance of, and obsession with, a song’s riffs (44-5). As noted by Em McAvan, Adorno’s analysis elevates the producer over the consumer, portraying a culture industry controlling a passive audience through standardised products (McAvan). The characteristics that Adorno observed in the popular music of his time are classic traits of contemporary popular music. Mash-up artists, however, are not representative of Adorno’s producers for a passive audience, instead opting to wrest creative control from composers and the recording industry and adapt existing songs in pursuit of their own creative impulses. Although mash-up productions may consciously or unconsciously criticise the current state of popular music, they necessarily exist in creative symbiosis with the commercial genres: “if pop songs weren’t simple and formulaic, it would be much harder for mashup bedroom auteurs to do their job” (McLeod, “Confessions”, 86). Arguably, when creating mash-ups, some individuals are expressing their dissatisfaction with the stagnation of the pop industry and are instead working to create music that they as consumers wish to hear. Sample-based music—as an exercise in adaptation—encourages a Foucauldian questioning of the composer’s authority over their musical texts. Recorded music is typically a passive medium in which the consumer receives the music in its original, unaltered form. DJ Dangermouse (Brian Burton) breached this pact to create his Grey Album, which is a mash-up of an a cappella version of Jay-Z’s Black Album and the Beatles’ eponymous album (also known as the White Album). Dangermouse says that “every kick, snare, and chord is taken from the Beatles White Album and is in their original recording somewhere.” In deconstructing the Beatles’ songs, Dangermouse turned the recordings into a palette for creating his own new work, adapting audio fragments to suit his creative impulses. As Joanna Demers writes, “refashioning these sounds and reorganising them into new sonic phrases and sentences, he creates acoustic mosaics that in most instances are still traceable to the Beatles source, yet are unmistakeably distinct from it” (139-40). Dangermouse’s approach is symptomatic of what Schütze refers to as remix culture: an open challenge to a culture predicated on exclusive ownership, authorship, and controlled distribution … . Against ownership it upholds an ethic of creative borrowing and sharing. Against the original it holds out an open process of recombination and creative transformation. It equally calls into question the categories, rifts and borders between high and low cultures, pop and elitist art practices, as well as blurring lines between artistic disciplines. Using just a laptop, an audio editor and a calculator, Gregg Gillis, a.k.a. Girl Talk, created the Night Ripper album using samples from 167 artists (Dombale). Although all the songs on Night Ripper are blatantly sampled-based, Gillis sees his creations as “original things” (Dombale). The adaptation of sampled fragments culled from the Top 40 is part of Gillis’ creative process: “It’s not about who created this source originally, it’s about recontextualising—creating new music. … I’ve always tried to make my own songs” (Dombale). Gillis states that his music has no political message, but is a reflection of his enthusiasm for pop music: “It’s a celebration of everything Top 40, that’s the point” (Dombale). Gillis’ “celebratory” exercises in creativity echo those of various fan-fiction authors who celebrate the characters and worlds that constitute popular culture. Adaptation through sampling is not always centred solely on music. Sydney-based Tom Compagnoni, a.k.a. Wax Audio, adapted a variety of sound bytes from politicians and media personalities including George W. Bush, Alexander Downer, Alan Jones, Ray Hadley, and John Howard in the creation of his Mediacracy E.P.. In one particular instance, Compagnoni used a myriad of samples culled from various media appearances by George W. Bush to recreate the vocals for John Lennon’s Imagine. Created in early 2005, the track, which features speeded-up instrumental samples from a karaoke version of Lennon’s original, is an immediate irony fuelled comment on the invasion of Iraq. The rationale underpinning the song is further emphasised when “Imagine This” reprises into “Let’s Give Peace a Chance” interspersed with short vocal fragments of “Come Together”. Compagnoni justifies his adaptations by presenting appropriated media sound bytes that deliberately set out to demonstrate the way information is manipulated to present any particular point of view. Playing the media like an instrument, Wax Audio juxtaposes found sounds in a way that forces the listener to confront the bias, contradiction and sensationalism inherent in their daily intake of media information. … Oh yeah—and it’s bloody funny hearing George W Bush sing “Imagine”. Notwithstanding the humorous quality of the songs, Mediacracy represents a creative outlet for Compagnoni’s political opinions that is emphasised by the adaptation of Lennon’s song. Through his adaptation, Compagnoni revitalises Lennon’s sentiments about the Vietnam War and superimposes them onto the US policy on Iraq. An interesting aspect of sampled-based music is the re-occurrence of particular samples across various productions, which demonstrates that the same fragment can be adapted for a plethora of musical contexts. For example, Clyde Stubblefield’s “Funky Drummer” break is reputed to be the most sampled break in the world. The break from 1960s soul/funk band the Winstons’ “Amen Brother” (the B-side to their 1969 release “Color Him Father”), however, is another candidate for the title of “most sampled break”. The “Amen break” was revived with the advent of the sampler. Having featured heavily in early hip-hop records such as “Words of Wisdom” by Third Base and “Straight Out of Compton” by NWA, the break “appears quite adaptable to a range of music genres and tastes” (Harrison, 9m 46s). Beginning in the early 1990s, adaptations of this break became a constant of jungle music as sampling technology developed to facilitate more complex operations (Harrison, 5m 52s). The break features on Shy FX’s “Original Nutta”, L Double & Younghead’s “New Style”, Squarepusher’s “Big Acid”, and a cover version of Led Zepplin’s “Whole Lotta Love” by Jane’s Addiction front man Perry Farrell. This is to name but a few tracks that have adapted the break. Wikipedia offers a list of songs employing an adaptation of the “Amen break”. This list, however, falls short of the “hundreds of tracks” argued for by Nate Harrison, who notes that “an entire subculture based on this one drum loop … six seconds from 1969” has developed (8m 45s). The “Amen break” is so ubiquitous that, much like the twelve bar blues structure, it has become a foundational element of an entire genre and has been adapted to satisfy a plethora of creative impulses. The sheer prevalence of the “Amen break” simultaneously illustrates the creative nature of music adaptation as well as the potentials for adaptation stemming from digital technology such as the sampler. The cut-up and rearrangement aspect of creative sampling technology at once suggests the original but also something new and different. Sampling in general, and the phenomenon of the “Amen break” in particular, ensures the longevity of the original sources; sampled-based music exhibits characteristics acquired from the source materials, yet the illegitimate offspring are not their parents. Sampling as a technology for creatively adapting existing forms of audio has encouraged alternative approaches to musical composition. Further, it has given rise to a new breed of musician that has adapted to technologies of adaptation. Mash-up artists and samplists demonstrate that recorded music is not simply a fixed or read-only product but one that can be freed from the composer’s original arrangement to be adapted and reconfigured. Many mash-up artists such as Gregg Gillis are not trained musicians, but their ears are honed from enthusiastic consumption of music. Individuals such as DJ Dangermouse, Gregg Gillis and Tom Compagnoni appropriate, reshape and re-present the surrounding soundscape to suit diverse creative urges, thereby adapting the passive medium of recorded sound into an active production tool. References Adorno, Theodor. “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening.” The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. Ed. J. Bernstein. London, New York: Routledge, 1991. Burnett, Henry. “Ruggieri and Vivaldi: Two Venetian Gloria Settings.” American Choral Review 30 (1988): 3. Compagnoni, Tom. “Wax Audio: Mediacracy.” Wax Audio. 2005. 2 Apr. 2007 http://www.waxaudio.com.au/downloads/mediacracy>. Coombe, Rosemary. The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties. Durham, London: Duke University Press, 1998. Demers, Joanna. Steal This Music: How Intellectual Property Law Affects Musical Creativity. Athens, London: University of Georgia Press, 2006. Dombale, Ryan. “Interview: Girl Talk.” Pitchfork. 2006. 9 Jan. 2007 http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/37785/Interview_Interview_Girl_Talk>. Duffel, Daniel. Making Music with Samples. San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 2005. Forbes, Anne-Marie. “A Venetian Festal Gloria: Antonio Lotti’s Gloria in D Major.” Music Research: New Directions for a New Century. Eds. M. Ewans, R. Halton, and J. Phillips. London: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2004. Green, Robert. “George Clinton: Ambassador from the Mothership.” Synthesis. Undated. 15 Sep. 2005 http://www.synthesis.net/music/story.php?type=story&id=70>. Harrison, Nate. “Can I Get an Amen?” Nate Harrison. 2004. 8 Jan. 2007 http://www.nkhstudio.com>. Lawrence, Dale. “On Mashups.” Nuvo. 2002. 8 Jan. 2007 http://www.nuvo.net/articles/article_292/>. Lessig, Lawrence. The Future of Ideas. New York: Random House, 2001. ———. Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004. McAvan, Em. “Boulevard of Broken Songs: Mash-Ups as Textual Re-Appropriation of Popular Music Culture.” M/C Journal 9.6 (2006) 3 Apr. 2007 http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0612/02-mcavan.php>. McLeod, Kembrew. “Confessions of an Intellectual (Property): Danger Mouse, Mickey Mouse, Sonny Bono, and My Long and Winding Path as a Copyright Activist-Academic.” Popular Music & Society 28.79. ———. Freedom of Expression: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity. United States: Doubleday Books. Morris, Sue. “Co-Creative Media: Online Multiplayer Computer Game Culture.” Scan 1.1 (2004). 8 Jan. 2007 http://scan.net.au/scan/journal/display_article.php?recordID=16>. Petridis, Alexis. “Pop Will Eat Itself.” The Guardian UK. March 2003. 8 Jan. 2007 http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/critic/feature/0,1169,922797,00.html>. Riley. “Pop Will Eat Itself—Or Will It?”. The Truth Unknown (archived at Archive.org). 2003. 9 Jan. 2007 http://web.archive.org/web/20030624154252 /www.thetruthunknown.com/viewnews.asp?articleid=79>. Schütze, Bernard. “Samples from the Heap: Notes on Recycling the Detritus of a Remixed Culture”. Horizon Zero 2003. 8 Jan. 2007 http://www.horizonzero.ca/textsite/remix.php?tlang=0&is=8&file=5>. Vaidhyanathan, Siva. Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity. New York, London: New York University Press, 2003. Woodmansee, Martha. “On the Author Effect: Recovering Collectivity.” The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature. Eds. M. Woodmansee, P. Jaszi and P. Durham; London: Duke University Press, 1994. 15. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Collins, Steve. "Amen to That: Sampling and Adapting the Past." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/09-collins.php>. APA Style Collins, S. (May 2007) "Amen to That: Sampling and Adapting the Past," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/09-collins.php>.

Introduction Utopia has always been countercultural, and ever since technological progress has allowed, utopia has been using alternative media to promote and strengthen its underpinning ideals. In this article, I am seeking to clarify the connections between counterculture and alternative media in utopian contexts to demonstrate their reciprocity, then draw together these threads through reference to a well-known figure of the Rainbow Region–Rusty Miller. His trajectory from iconic surfer and Aquarian reporter to mediator for utopian politics and ideals in the Rainbow Region encompasses in a single identity the three elements underpinning this study. In concluding, I will turn to Rusty’s Byron Guide, questioning its classification as alternative or mainstream media, and whether Byron Bay is represented as countercultural and utopian in this long-running and ongoing publication. Counterculture and Alternative Media in Utopian Contexts Counterculture is an umbrella that enfolds utopia, among many other genres and practices. It has been most often situated in the 1960s and 1970s as a new form of social movement embodying youth resistance to the technocratic mainstream and its norms of gender, sexuality, politics, music, and language (Roszak). Many scholars of counterculture underscore its utopian impulses both in the projection of better societies where the social goals are achieved, and in the withdrawal from mainstream society into intentional communities (Yinger 194-6; McKay 5; Berger). Before exploring further the connections between counterculture and alternative media, I want to define the scope of countercultural utopian contexts in general, and the Rainbow Region in particular. Utopia is a neologism created by Sir Thomas More almost 500 years ago to designate the island community that demonstrates order, harmony, justice, hope and desire in the right balance so that it seems like an ideal land. This imaginary place described in Utopia (1516) as a counterpoint to the social, political and religious shortcomings of contemporary 16th century British society, has attracted accusations of heresy (Molner), and been used as a pejorative term, an insult to denigrate political projects that seem farfetched or subversive, especially during the 19th century. Almost every study of utopian theory, literature and practice points to a dissatisfaction with the status quo, which inspires writers, politicians, architects, artists, individuals and communities to rail against it (see for example Davis, Moylan, Suvin, Levitas, Jameson). Kingsley Widmer’s book Counterings: Utopian Dialectics in Contemporary Contexts reiterates what many scholars have stated when he writes that utopias should be understood in terms of what they are countering. Lyman Tower Sargent defines utopia as “a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space” and utopianism as “social dreaming” (9), to which I would add that both indicate an improvement on the alternatives, and may indeed be striving to represent the best place imaginable. Utopian contexts, by extension, are those situations where the “social dreaming” is enhanced through human agency, good governance, just laws, education, and work, rather than being a divinely ordained state of nature (Schaer et al). In this way, utopian contexts are explicitly countercultural through their very conception, as human agency is required and their emphasis is on social change. These modes of resistance against dominant paradigms are most evident in attempts to realise textual projections of a better society in countercultural communal experiments. Almost immediately after its publication, More’s Utopia became the model for Bishop Vasco de Quiroga’s communitarian hospital-town Santa Fe de la Laguna in Michoacan, Mexico, established in the 1530s as a counterculture to the oppressive enslavement and massacres of the Purhépecha people by Nuno Guzmán (Green). The countercultural thrust of the 1960s and 1970s provided many utopian contexts, perhaps most readily identifiable as the intentional communities that spawned and flourished, especially in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand (Metcalf, Shared Lives). They were often inspired by texts such as Charles A. Reich’s The Greening of America (1970) and Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975), and this convergence of textual practices and alternative lifestyles can be seen in the development of Australia’s own Rainbow Region. Located in northern New South Wales, the geographical area of the Northern Rivers that has come to be known as the Rainbow Region encompasses Byron Bay, Nimbin, Mullumbimby, Bangalow, Clunes, Dunoon, Federal, with Lismore as the region’s largest town. But more evocative than these place names are the “rivers and creeks, vivid green hills, fruit and nut farms […] bounded by subtropical beaches and rainforest mountains” (Wilson 1). Utopian by nature, and recognised as such by the indigenous Bundjalung people who inhabited it before the white settlers, whalers and dairy farmers moved in, the Rainbow Region became utopian through culture–or indeed counterculture–during the 1973 Aquarius Festival in Nimbin when the hippies of Mullumbimby and the surfers of Byron Bay were joined by up to 10,000 people seeking alternative ways of being in the world. When the party was over, many Aquarians stayed on to form intentional communities in the beautiful region, like Tuntable Falls, Nimbin’s first and largest such cooperative (Metcalf, From Utopian Dreaming to Communal Reality 74-83). In utopian contexts, from the Renaissance to the 1970s and beyond, counterculture has underpinned and alternative media has circulated the aims and ideals of the communities of resistance. The early utopian context of the Anabaptist movement has been dubbed as countercultural by Sigrun Haude: “During the reign of the Münster (1534-5) Anabaptists erected not only a religious but also a social and political counterculture to the existing order” (240). And it was this Protestant Reformation that John Downing calls the first real media war, with conflicting movements using pamphlets produced on the new technology of the Gutenberg press to disseminate their ideas (144). What is striking here is the confluence of ideas and practices at this time–countercultural ideals are articulated, published, and disseminated, printing presses make this possible, and utopian activists realise how mass media can be used and abused, exploited and censored. Twentieth century countercultural movements drew on the lessons learnt from historical uprising and revolutions, understanding the importance of getting the word out through their own forms of media which, given the subversive nature of the messages, were essentially alternative, according to the criteria proposed by Chris Atton: alternative media may be understood as a radical challenge to the professionalized and institutionalized practices of the mainstream media. Alternative media privileges a journalism that is closely wedded to notions of social responsibility, replacing an ideology of “objectivity” with overt advocacy and oppositional practices. Its practices emphasize first person, eyewitness accounts by participants; a reworking of the populist approaches of tabloid newspapers to recover a “radical popular” style of reporting; collective and antihierarchical forms of organization which eschew demarcation and specialization–and which importantly suggest an inclusive, radical form of civic journalism. (267) Nick Couldry goes further to point out the utopian processes required to identify agencies of change, including alternative media, which he defines as “practices of symbolic production which contest (in some way) media power itself–that is, the concentration of symbolic power in media institutions” (25). Alternative media’s orientation towards oppositional and contestatory practices demonstrates clear parallels between its ambitions and those of counterculture in utopian contexts. From the 1960s onwards, the upsurge in alternative newspaper numbers is commensurate with the blossoming of the counterculture and increased utopian contexts; Susan Forde describes it thus: “a huge resurgence in the popularity of publications throughout the ‘counter-culture’ days of the 1960s and 1970s” (“Monitoring the Establishment”, 114). The nexus of counterculture and alternative media in such utopian contexts is documented in texts like Roger Streitmatter’s Voices of Revolution and Bob Osterlag’s People’s Movements, People’s Press. Like the utopian newspapers that came out of 18th and 19th century intentional communities, many of the new alternative press served to educate, socialise, promote and represent the special interests of the founders and followers of the countercultural movements, often focusing on the philosophy and ideals underpinning these communities rather than the everyday events (see also Frobert). The radical press in Australia was also gaining ground, with OZ in Australia from 1963-1969, and then from 1967-1973 in London. Magazines launched by Philip Frazer like The Digger, Go-Set, Revolution and High Times, and university student newspapers were the main avenues for youth and alternative expression on the Vietnam war and conscription, gay and lesbian rights, racism, feminism and ecological activism (Forde, Challenging the News; Cock & Perry). Nimbin 1973: Rusty Miller and The Byron Express The 1973 Aquarius Festival of counterculture in Nimbin (12-23 May) was a utopian context that had an alternative media life of its own before it arrived in the Rainbow Region–in student publications like Tharnuka and newsletters distributed via the Aquarius Foundation. There were other voices that announced the coming of the Aquarius Festival to Nimbin and reported on its impact, like The Digger from Melbourne and the local paper, The Northern Star. During the Festival, the Nimbin Good Times first appeared as the daily bulletin and continues today with the original masthead drawn by the Festival’s co-organiser, Graeme Dunstan. Some interesting work has been done on this area, ranging from general studies of the Rainbow Region (Wilson; Munro-Clark) to articles analysing its alternative press (Ward & van Vuuren; Martin & Ellis), but to date, there has been no focus on the Rainbow Region’s first alternative newspaper, The Byron Express. Co-edited by Rusty Miller and David Guthrie, this paper presented and mediated the aims and desires of the Aquarian movement. Though short-lived, as only 7 issues were published from 15 February 1973 to September 1973, The Byron Express left a permanent printed vestige of the Aquarian counterculture movement’s activism and ideals from an independent regional perspective. Miller’s credentials for starting up the newspaper are clear–he has always been a trailblazer, mixing “smarts” with surfing and environmental politics. After graduating from a Bachelor of Arts in history from San Diego State College, he first set foot in Byron Bay during his two semesters with the inaugural Chapman College affiliated University of the Seven Seas in 1965-6. Returning to his hometown of Encinitas, he co-founded the Surf Research accessory company with legendary Californian surfer Mike Doyle, and launched Waxmate, the first specially formulated surf wax in 1967 (Davis, Witzig & James; Warshaw 217), selling his interest in the business soon after to spend a couple of years “living the counterculture life on the Hawaiian Island of Kauai” (Davis, Witzig & James), before heading back to Byron Bay via Bells Beach in 1970 (Miller & Shantz) and Sydney, where he worked as an advertising salesman and writer with Tracks surfing magazine (Martin & Ellis). In 1971, he was one of the first to ride the now famous waves of Uluwatu in Bali, and is captured with Steven Cooney in the iconic publicity image for Albe Falzon’s 1971 film, Morning Of The Earth. The champion surfer from the US knew a thing or two about counterculture, alternative media, advertising and business when he found his new utopian context in Byron Bay. Miller and Guthrie’s front-page editorial of the inaugural issue of The Byron Express, published on 15 February 1973, with the byline “for a higher shire”, expressed the countercultural (cl)aims of the publication. Land use, property development and the lack of concern that some people in Byron had for their impact on the environment and people of the region were a prime target: With this first issue of the Byron Express, we hope to explain that the area is badly in need of a focal point. The transitions of present are vast and moving fast. The land is being sold and resold. Lots of money is coming into the area in the way of developments […] caravan parts, hotels, businesses and real estate. Many of the trips incoming are not exactly “concerned” as to what long term effect such developments might have on the environment and its people. We hope to serve as a focus of concern and service, a centre for expression and reflection. We would ask your contributions in vocal and written form. We are ready for some sock it to ya criticism… and hope you would grab us upon the street to tell us how you feel…The mission of this alternative newspaper is thereby defined by the need for a “focal point” that inscribes the voices of the community in a freely accessible narrative, recorded in print for posterity. Although this first issue contains no mention of the Aquarius Festival, there were already rumours circulating about it, as organisers Graeme Dunstan and Johnny Allen had been up to Main Arm, Mullumbimby and Nimbin on reconnaissance missions beginning in September 1972. Instead, there was an article on “Mullumbimby Man–Close to the Land” by Nicholas Shand, who would go on to found the community-based weekly newspaper The Echo in 1986, then called The Brunswick Valley Echo and still going strong. Another by Bob McTavish asked whether there could be a better form of government; there was a surf story, and a soul food section with a recipe for honey meade entitled “Do you want to get out of it on 10 cents a bottle?” The second issue continues in much the same vein. It is not until the third issue comes out on 17 March 1973 that the Aquarius Festival is mentioned in a skinny half column on page four. And it’s not particularly promising: Arrived at Nimbin, sleepy hamlet… Office in disused R.S.L. rooms, met a couple of guys recently arrived, said nothing was being done. “Only women here, you know–no drive”. Met Joanne and Vi, both unable to say anything to be reported… Graham Dunstan (codenamed Superfest) and John Allen nowhere in sight. Allen off on trip overseas. Dunstan due back in a couple of weeks. 10 weeks to go till “they” all come… and to what… nobody is quite sure. This progress report provides a fascinating contemporary insight into the tensions–between the local surfies and hippies on one hand, and the incoming students on the other–around the organisation of the Aquarius Festival. There is an unbridled barb at the sexist comments made by the guys, implicit criticism of the absent organisers, obvious skepticism about whether anyone will actually come to the festival, and wonderment at what it will be like. Reading between the lines, we might find a feeling of resentment about not being privy to new developments in their own backyard. The final lines of the article are non-committal “Anyway, let’s see what eventuates when the Chiefs return.” It seems that all has been resolved by the fifth issue of 11 May, which is almost entirely dedicated to the Aquarius Festival with the front page headline “Welcome to the New Age”. But there is still an undertone of slight suspicion at what the newcomers to the area might mean in terms of property development: The goal is improving your fellow man’s mind and nourishment in concert with your own; competition to improve your day and the quality of the day for society. Meanwhile, what is the first thing one thinks about when he enters Byron and the area? The physical environment is so magnificent and all encompassing that it can actually hold a man’s breath back a few seconds. Then a man says, “Wow, this land is so beautiful that one could make a quid here.” And from that moment the natural aura and spells are broken and the mind lapses into speculative equations, sales projections and future interest payments. There is plenty of “love” though, in this article: “The gathering at Nimbin is the most spectacular demonstration of the faith people have in a belief that is possible (and possible just because they want it to be) to live in love, through love together.” The following article signed by Rusty Miller “A Town Together” is equally focused on love: “See what you could offer the spirit at Nimbin. It might introduce you to a style that could lead to LOVE.” The centre spread features photos: the obligatory nudes, tents, and back to nature activities, like planting and woodworking. With a text box of “random comments” including one from a Lismore executive: ‘I took my wife and kids out there last weekend and we had such a good time. Seems pretty organized and the town was loaded with love. Heard there is some hepatitis about and rumours of VD. Everyone happy.” And another from a land speculator (surely the prime target of Miller’s wrath): “Saw guys kissing girls on the street, so sweet, bought 200 acres right outside of town, it’s going to be valuable out there some day.” The interview with Johnny Allen as the centrepiece includes some pertinent commentary on the media and reveals a well-founded suspicion of the mediatisation of the Aquarius Festival: We have tried to avoid the media actually. But we haven’t succeeded in doing so. Part of the basic idea is that we don’t need to be sold. All the down town press can do is try and interpret you. And by doing that it automatically places it in the wrong sort of context. So we’ve tried to keep it to people writing about the festival to people who will be involved in it. It’s an involvement festival. Coopting The Byron Express as an “involved” party effects a fundamental shift from an external reporting newspaper to a kind of proponent or even propaganda for the Aquarius festival and its ideas, like so many utopian newspapers had done before. It is therefore perhaps inevitable that The Byron Express should disappear very soon after the Aquarius festival. Fiona Martin and Rhonda Ellis explain that Rusty Miller stopped producing the paper because he “found the production schedule exhausting and his readership too small to attract consistent advertising” (5). At any rate, there were only two more issues, one in June–with some follow up reporting of the festival–and another in September 1973, which was almost entirely devoted to environmentally focused features, including an interview with Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal). Byron Bay 2013: Thirty Years of Rusty’s Byron Guide What Rusty did next is fairly well known locally–surfing and teaching people how to surf and a bit of writing. When major local employer Walkers slaughterhouse closed in 1983, he and his wife, social geographer Tricia Shantz, were asked by the local council to help promote Byron Bay as a tourist destination, writing the first Byron guide in 1983-4. Incorporating essays by local personalities and dedicated visitors, the Byron guide perpetuates the ideal of environmental awareness, spiritual experimentation, and respect for the land and sea. Recent contributors have included philosopher Peter Singer, political journalist Kerry O’Brien, and writer John Ralston Saul, and Miller and Shantz always have an essay in there themselves. “People, Politics and Culture” is the new byline for the 2013 edition. And Miller’s opening essay mediates the same utopian desires and environmental community messages that he espoused from the beginning of The Byron Express: The name Byron Bay represents something that we constantly try to articulate. If one was to dream up a menu of situations and conditions to compose a utopia, Australia would be the model of the nation-state and Byron would have many elements of the actual place one might wish to live for the rest of their lives. But of course there is always the danger of excesses in tropical paradises especially when they become famous destinations. Australia is being held to ransom for the ideology that we should be slaves to money and growth at the cost of a degraded and polluted physical and social environment. Byron at least was/is a refuge against this profusion of the so-called real-world perception that holds profit over environment as the way we must choose for our future. Even when writing for a much more commercial medium, Miller retains the countercultural utopian spirit that was crystallised in the Aquarius festival of 1973, and which remains relevant to many of those living in and visiting the Rainbow Region. Miller’s ethos moves beyond the alternative movements and communities to infiltrate travel writing and tourism initiatives in the area today, as evidenced in the Rusty’s Byron Guide essays. By presenting more radical discourses for a mainstream public, Miller together with Shantz have built on the participatory role that he played in launching the region’s first alternative newspaper in 1973 that became albeit briefly the equivalent of a countercultural utopian gazette. Now, he and Shantz effectively play the same role, producing a kind of countercultural form of utopian media for Byron Bay that corresponds to exactly the same criteria mentioned above. Through their free publication, they aim to educate, socialise, promote and represent the special interests of the founders and followers of the Rainbow Region, focusing on the philosophy and ideals underpinning these communities rather than the everyday events. The Byron Bay that Miller and Shantz promote is resolutely utopian, and certainly countercultural if compared to other free publications like The Book, a new shopping guide, or mainstream media elsewhere. Despite this new competition, they are planning the next edition for 2015 with essays to make people think, talk, and understand the region’s issues, so perhaps the counterculture is still holding its own against the mainstream. References Atton, Chris. “What Is ‘Alternative’ Journalism?” Journalism: Theory, Practice, Criticism 4.3 (2003): 267-72. Berger, Bennett M. The Survival of a Counterculture: Ideological Work and Everyday Life among Rural Communards. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2004. Cock, Peter H., & Paul F. Perry. “Australia's Alternative Media.” Media Information Australia 6 (1977): 4-13. Couldry, Nick. “Mediation and Alternative Media, or Relocating the Centre of Media and Communication Studies.” Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture & Policy 103, (2002): 24-31. Davis, Dale, John Witzig & Don James. “Rusty Miller.” Encyclopedia of Surfing. 10 Nov. 2014 ‹http://encyclopediaofsurfing.com/entries/miller-rusty›. Downing, John. Radical Media: Rebellious Communication and Social Movements. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Davis, J.C. Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing 1516-1700. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983. Forde, Susan. Challenging the News: The Journalism of Alternative and Independent Media. Palgrave Macmillan: London, 2011. ---. “Monitoring the Establishment: The Development of the Alternative Press in Australia” Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture & Policy 87 (May 1998): 114-133. Frobert, Lucien. “French Utopian Socialists as the First Pioneers in Development.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 35 (2011): 729-49. Green, Toby. Thomas More’s Magician: A Novel Account of Utopia in Mexico. London: Phoenix, 2004. Goffman, Ken, & Dan Joy. Counterculture through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House. New York: Villard Books. 2004. Haude, Sigrun. “Anabaptism.” The Reformation World. Ed. Andrew Pettegree. London: Routledge, 2000. 237-256. Jameson, Fredric. Archeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. New York: Verso, 2005. Levitas, Ruth. Utopia as Method. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Martin, Fiona, & Rhonda Ellis. “Dropping In, Not Out: The Evolution of the Alternative Press in Byron Shire 1970-2001.” Transformations 2 (2002). 10 Nov. 2014 ‹http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_02/pdf/MartinEllis.pdf›. McKay, George. Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties. London: Verso, 1996. Metcalf, Bill. From Utopian Dreaming to Communal Reality: Cooperative Lifestyles in Australia. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1995. ---. Shared Visions, Shared Lives: Communal Living around the Globe. Forres, UK: Findhorn Press, 1996. Miller, Rusty & Tricia Shantz. Turning Point: Surf Portraits and Stories from Bells to Byron 1970-1971. Surf Research. 2012. Molnar, Thomas. Utopia: The Perennial Heresy. London: Tom Stacey, 1972. Moylan, Tom. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. New York: Methuen, 1986. Munro-Clark, Margaret. Communes in Rural Australia: The Movement since 1970. Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1986. Osterlag, Bob. People’s Movements, People’s Press: The Journalism of Social Justice Movements. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. New York: Anchor, 1969. Sargent, Lyman Tower. “Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.” Utopian Studies 5.1 (1994): 1-37. Schaer, Roland, Gregory Claeys, and Lyman Tower Sargent, eds. Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World. New York: New York Public Library/Oxford UP, 2000. Streitmatter, Roger. Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America. Columbia: Columbia UP, 2001. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. Ward, Susan, & Kitty van Vuuren. “Belonging to the Rainbow Region: Place, Local Media, and the Construction of Civil and Moral Identities Strategic to Climate Change Adaptability.” Environmental Communication 7.1 (2013): 63-79. Warshaw, Matt. The History of Surfing. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2011. Wilson, Helen. (Ed.). Belonging in the Rainbow Region: Cultural Perspectives on the NSW North Coast. Lismore, NSW: Southern Cross University Press, 2003. Widmer, Kingsley. Counterings: Utopian Dialectics in Contemporary Contexts. Ann Arbor, London: UMI Research Press, 1988. Yinger, J. Milton. Countercultures: The Promise and Peril of a World Turned Upside Down. New York: The Free Press, 1982.

“The cop in our head represses us better than any police force. Through generations of conditioning, the system has created people who have a very hard time coming together to create resistance.” – Seth Tobocman, War in the Neighborhood (1999) Even when creators of autobiographically-based comics claim to depict real events, their works nonetheless inspire confrontations as a result of ideological contestations which position them, on the one hand, as popular culture, and, on the other hand, as potentially subversive material for adults. In Seth Tobocman’s War in the Neighborhood (1999), the street politics in which Tobocman took part extends the graphic novel narrative to address personal experiences as seen through a social lens both political and fragmented by the politics of relationships. Unlike Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986, 1991), War in the Neighborhood is situated locally and with broader frames of reference, but, like Maus, resonates globally across cultures. Because Tobocman figures the street as the primary site of struggle, John Street’s historiographically-oriented paper, “Political Culture – From Civic Culture to Mass Culture”, presents a framework for understanding not that symbols determine action, any more than material or other objective conditions do, but rather that there is a constant process of interpretation and reinterpretation which is important to the way actors view their predicament and formulate their intentions. (107-108) Though Street’s main focus is on the politicization of choices involving institutional structures, his observation offers a useful context to examining Tobocman’s memoir of protest in New York City. Tobocman’s identity as an artist, however, leads him to caution his readers: Yes, it [War in the Neighborhood] is based on real situations and events, just as a landscape by Van Gogh may be based on a real landscape. But we would not hire Van Gogh as a surveyor on the basis of those paintings. (From the “Disclaimer” on the copyright page.) This speaks to the reality that all art, no matter how innocuously expressed, reflect interpretations refracted from the artists’ angles. It also calls attention to the individual artist’s intent. For Tobocman, “I ask that these stories be judged not on how accurately they depict particular events, but on what they contain of the human spirit” (from the “Disclaimer” on the copyright page). War in the Neighborhood, drawn in what appears to be pencil and marker, alternates primarily between solidly-inked black generic shapes placed against predominantly white backgrounds (chapters 1-3, 5, 7-9, and 11) and depth-focused drawing-quality images framed against mostly black backgrounds (chapters 4 and 6); chapter 10 represents an anomaly because it features typewritten text and photographs that reify the legitimacy of the events portrayed even when “intended to be a work of art” (from the “Disclaimer” on the copyright page). According to Luc Sante’s “Introduction”, “the high-contrast images here are descended from the graphic vocabulary of Masereel and Lynn Ward, an efficient and effective means of representing the war of body and soul” (n.p.). This is especially evident in the last page of War in the Neighborhood, where Tobocman bleeds himself through four panels, the left side of his body dressed in skin with black spaces for bone and the right side of his body skeletonized against his black frame (panels 5-6: 328). For Tobocman, “the war of body and soul” reifies the struggle against the state, through which its representatives define people as capital rather than as members of a social contract. Before the second chapter, however, Tobocman introduces New York squatter, philosopher and teacher Raphael Bueno’s tepee-embedded white-texted poem, “‘Nine-Tenths of the Law’” (29). Bueno’s words eloquently express the heart behind War in the Neighborhood, but could easily be dismissed because they take up only one page. The poem’s position is significant, however. It reflects the struggles between agency and class, between power and oppression, and between capitalism and egalitarianism. Tobocman includes a similar white-texted tepee in Chapter 4, though the words are not justified and the spacing between the words and the edges of the tepee are larger. In this chapter, Tobocman focuses on the increasing media attention given to the Thompson Square Park homeless, who first organize as “the Homeless Clients Advisory Board” (panel 7: 86). The white-texted tepee reads: They [Tent City members] got along well with the Chinese students, participated in free China rallys, learned to say ‘Down with Deng Xiao ping’ in Chinese. It was becoming clear to Tent City that their homelessness meant some thing on a world stage. (panel 6: 103) The OED Online cites 1973 as the first use of gentrification, which appeared in “Times 26 Sept. 19/3.” It also lists uses in 1977, 1982 and 1985. While the examples provided point to business-specific interests associated with gentrification, it is now defined as “the process by which an (urban) area is rendered middle-class.” While gentrification, thus, infers the displacement of minority members for the benefits of white privilege, it is also complicated by issues of eminent domain. For the disenfranchised who lack access to TV, radio and other venues of public expression (i.e., billboards), “taking it to the streets” means trafficking ideas, grievances and/or evangelisms. In places like NYC, the nexus for civic engagement is the street. The main thrust of Tobocman’s War in the Neighborhood, however, centers on the relationships between (1) the squatters, against whom Reagan-era economics destabilized, (2) the police, whose roles changed as local policies shifted to accommodate urban planning, (3) the politicians, who “began to campaign to destroy innercity neighborhoods” (20), and (4) the media, which served elitist interests. By chapter 3, Tobocman intrudes himself into the narrative to personalize the story of squatters and their resistance of an agenda that worked to exclude them. In chapter 4, he intersects the interests of squatters with the homeless. With chapter 5, Tobocman, already involved, becomes a squatter, too; however, he also maintains his apartment, making him both an insider and an outsider. The meta-discourses include feminism, sexism and racism, entwined concepts usually expressed in opposition. Fran is a feminist who demands not only equality for women, but also respect. Most of the men share traditional values of manhood. Racism, while recognized at a societal level, creeps into the choices concerning the dismissal or acceptance of blacks and whites at ABC House on 13th Street, where Tobocman resided. As if speaking to an interviewer, a black woman explains, as a white male, his humanity had a full range of expression. But to be a black person and still having that full range of expression, you were punished for it. ... It was very clear that there were two ways of handling people who were brought to the building. (full-page panel: 259) Above the right side of her head is a yin yang symbol, whose pattern contrasts with the woman’s face, which also shows shading on the right side. The yin yang represents equanimity between two seemingly opposing forces, yet they cannot exist without the other; it means harmony, but also relation. This suggests balance, as well as a shared resistance for which both sides of the yin yang maintain their identities while assuming community within the other. However, as Luc Sante explains in his “Introduction” to War in the Neighborhood, the word “community” gets thrown around with such abandon these days it’s difficult to remember that it has ever meant anything other than a cluster of lobbyists. ... A community is in actuality a bunch of people whose intimate lives rub against one another’s on a daily basis, who possess a common purpose not unmarred by conflict of all sizes, who are thus forced to negotiate their way across every substantial decision. (n.p., italics added) The homeless organized among themselves to secure spaces like Tent House. The anarchists lobbied the law to protect their squats. The residents of ABC House created rules to govern their behaviors toward each other. In all these cases, they eventually found dissent among themselves. Turning to a sequence on the mayoral transition from Koch to Dinkins, Tobocman likens “this inauguration day” as a wedding “to join this man: David Dinkins…”, “with the governmental, business and real estate interests of New York City” (panel 1: 215). Similarly, ABC House, borrowing from the previous, tried to join with the homeless, squatters and activist organizations, but, as many lobbyists vying for the same privilege, contestations within and outside ABC splintered the goal of unification. Yet the street remains the focal point of War in the Neighborhood. Here, protests and confrontations with the police, who acted as intermediary agents for the politicians, make the L.E.S. (Lower East Side) a site of struggle where ordinary activities lead to war. Though the word war might otherwise seem like an exaggeration, Tobocman’s inclusion of a rarely seen masked figure says otherwise. This “t-shirt”-hooded (panel 1: 132) wo/man, one of “the gargoyles, the defenders of the buildings” (panel 3: 132), first appears in panel 3 on page 81 as part of this sequence: 319 E. 8th Street is now a vacant lot. (panel 12: 80) 319 taught the squatters to lock their doors, (panel 1: 81) always keep a fire extinguisher handy, (panel 2: 81) to stay up nights watching for the arsonist. (panel 3: 81) Never to trust courts cops, politicians (panel 4: 81) Recognize a state of war! (panel 5: 81) He or she reappears again on pages 132 and 325. In Fernando Calzadilla’s “Performing the Political: Encapuchados in Venezuela”, the same masked figures can be seen in the photographs included with his article. “Encapuchados,” translates Calzadilla, “means ‘hooded ones,’ so named because of the way the demonstrators wrap their T-shirts around their faces so only their eyes show, making it impossible for authorities to identify them” (105). While the Encapuchados are not the only group to dress as such, Tobocman’s reference to that style of dress in War in the Neighborhood points to the dynamics of transculturation and the influence of student movements on the local scene. Student movements, too, have traditionally used the street to challenge authority and to disrupt its market economy. More important, as Di Wang argues in his book Street Culture in Chengdu: Public Space, Urban Commoners, and Local Politics, 1870-1930, in the process of social transformation, street culture was not only the basis for commoners’ shared identity but also a weapon through which they simultaneously resisted the invasion of elite culture and adapted to its new social, economic, and political structures. (247) While focusing on the “transformation that resulted in the reconstruction of urban public space, re-creation of people’s public roles, and re-definition of the relationship among ordinary people, local elites and the state” (2), Wang looks at street culture much more broadly than Tobocman. Though Wang also connects the 1911 Revolution as a response to ethnic divisions, he examines in greater detail the everyday conflicts concerning local identities, prostitutes in a period marked by increasing feminisms, beggars who organized for services and food, and the role of tea houses as loci of contested meanings. Political organization, too, assumes a key role in his text. Similarly to Wang, what Tobocman addresses in War in the Neighborhood is the voice of the subaltern, whose street culture is marked by both social and economic dimensions. Like the poor in New York City, the squatters in Iran, according to Asef Bayat in his article “Un-Civil Society: The Politics of the ‘Informal People’”, “between 1976 and the early 1990s” (53) “got together and demanded electricity and running water: when they were refused or encountered delays, they resorted to do-it-yourself mechanisms of acquiring them illegally” (54). The men and women in Tobocman’s War in the Neighborhood, in contrast, faced barricaded lines of policemen on the streets, who struggled to keep them from getting into their squats, and also resorted to drastic measures to keep their buildings from being destroyed after the court system failed them. Should one question the events in Tobocman’s comics, however, he or she would need to go no further than Hans Pruijt’s article, “Is the Institutionalization of Urban Movements Inevitable? A Comparison of the Opportunities for Sustained Squatting in New York City and Amsterdam”: In the history of organized squatting on the Lower East Side, squatters of nine buildings or clusters of buildings took action to avert threat of eviction. Some of the tactics in the repertoire were: Legal action; Street protest or lock-down action targeting a (non-profit) property developer; Disruption of meetings; Non-violent resistance (e.g. placing oneself in the way of a demolition ball, lining up in front of the building); Fortification of the building(s); Building barricades in the street; Throwing substances at policemen approaching the building; Re-squatting the building after eviction. (149) The last chapter in Tobocman’s War in the Neighborhood, chapter 11: “Conclusion,” not only plays on the yin and yang concept with “War in the Neighborhood” in large print spanning two panels, with “War in the” in white text against a black background and “Neighborhood” in black text against a white background (panels 3-4: 322), but it also shows concretely how our wars against each other break us apart rather than allow us to move forward to share in the social contract. The street, thus, assumes a meta-narrative of its own: as a symbol of the pathways that can lead us in many directions, but through which we as “the people united” (full-page panel: 28) can forge a common path so that all of us benefit, not just the elites. Beyond that, Tobocman’s graphic novel travels through a world of activism and around the encounters of dramas between people with different goals and relationships to themselves. Part autobiography, part documentary and part commentary, his graphic novel collection of his comics takes the streets and turns them into a site for struggle and dislocation to ask at the end, “How else could we come to know each other?” (panel 6: 328). Tobocman also shapes responses to the text that mirror the travesty of protest, which brings discord to a world that still privileges order over chaos. Through this reconceptualization of a past that still lingers in the present, War in the Neighborhood demands a response from those who would choose “to take up the struggle against oppression” (panel 3: 328). In our turn, we need to recognize that the divisions between us are shards of the same glass. References Bayat, Asef. “Un-Civil Society: The Politics of the “Informal People.’” Third World Quarterly 18.1 (1997): 53-72. Calzadilla, Fernando. “Performing the Political: Encapuchados in Venezuela.” The Drama Review 46.4 (Winter 2002): 104-125. “Gentrification.” OED Online. 2nd Ed. (1989). http://0-dictionary.oed.com.csulib.ctstateu.edu/ cgi/entry/50093797?single=1&query_type=word&queryword=gentrification &first=1&max_to_show=10>. 25 Apr. 2006. Pruijt, Hans. “Is the Institutionalization of Urban Movements Inevitable? A Comparison of the Opportunities for Sustained Squatting in New York and Amsterdam.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27.1 (Mar. 2003): 133-157. Street, John. “Political Culture – From Civic to Mass Culture.” British Journal of Political Science 24.1 (Jan. 1994): 95-113. Toboman, Seth. War in the Neighborhood (chapter 1 originally published in Squatter Comics, no. 2 (Photo Reference provided by City Limits, Lower East Side Anti-displacement Center, Alan Kronstadt, and Lori Rizzo; Book References: Low Life, by Luc Sante, Palante (the story of the Young Lords Party), Squatters Handbook, Squatting: The Real Story, and Sweat Equity Urban Homesteading; Poem, “‘Nine-Tenths of the Law,’” by Raphael Bueno); chapter 2 (Inkers: Samantha Berger, Lasante Holland, Becky Minnich, Ursula Ostien, Barbara Lee, and Seth Tobocman; Photo Reference: the daily papers, John Penley, Barbara Lee, Paul Kniesel, Andrew Grossman, Peter LeVasseur, Betsy Herzog, William Comfort, and Johannes Kroemer; Page 81: Assistant Inker: Peter Kuper, Assistant Letterer: Sabrina Jones and Lisa Barnstone, Photo Reference: Paul Garin, John Penley, and Myron of E.13th St); chapter 3 originally published in Heavy Metal 15, no. 11 (Inkers: Peter Kuper and Seth Tobocman; Letterers: Sabrina Jones, Lisa Barnstone, and Seth Tobocman; Photo Reference: Paul Garin, John Penley, Myron of 13th Street, and Mitch Corber); chapter 4 originally published in World War 3 Illustrated, no. 21 (Photo Reference: John Penley, Andrew Lichtenstein, The Shadow, Impact Visuals, Paper Tiger TV, and Takeover; Journalistic Reference: Sarah Ferguson); chapter 5 originally published in World War 3 Illustrated, no. 13, and reprinted in World War 3 Illustrated Confrontational Comics, published by Four Walls Eight Windows (Photo Reference: John Penley and Chris Flash (The Shadow); chapter 6 (Photo reference: Clayton Patterson (primary), John Penley, Paul Garin, Andrew Lichtenstein, David Sorcher, Shadow Press, Impact Visuals, Marianne Goldschneider, Mike Scott, Mitch Corber, Anton Vandalen, Paul Kniesel, Chris Flash (Shadow Press), and Fran Luck); chapter 7 (Photo Reference: Sarah Teitler, Marianne Goldschneider, Clayton Patterson, Andrew Lichtenstein, David Sorcher, John Penley, Paul Kniesel, Barbara Lee, Susan Goodrich, Sarah Hogarth, Steve Ashmore, Survival Without Rent, and Bjorg; Inkers: Ursula Ostien, Barbara Lee, Samantha Berger, Becky Minnich, and Seth Tobocman); chapter 8 originally published in World War 3 Illustrated, no. 15 (Inkers: Laird Ogden and Seth Tobocman; Photo Reference: Paul Garin, Clayton Patterson, Paper Tiger TV, Shadow Press, Barbara Lee, John Penley, and Jack Dawkins; Collaboration on Last Page: Seth Tobocman, Zenzele Browne, and Barbara Lee); chapter 9 originally published in Real Girl (Photo Reference: Sarah Teitler and Barbara Lee); chapter 10 (Photos: John Penley, Chris Egan, and Scott Seabolt); chapter 11: “Conclusion” (Inkers: Barbara Lee, Laird Ogden, Samantha Berger, and Seth Tobocman; Photo Reference: Anton Vandalen). Intro. by Luc Sante. Computer Work: Eric Goldhagen and Ben Meyers. Text Page Design: Jim Fleming. Continuous Tone Prints and Stats Shot at Kenfield Studio: Richard Darling. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1999. Wang, Di. Street Culture in Chengdu: Public Space, Urban Commoners, and Local Politics, 1870-1930. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2003. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Raney, Vanessa. "Where Ordinary Activities Lead to War: Street Politics in Seth Tobocman’s War in the Neighborhood." M/C Journal 9.3 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/01-raney.php>. APA Style Raney, V. (Jul. 2006) "Where Ordinary Activities Lead to War: Street Politics in Seth Tobocman’s War in the Neighborhood," M/C Journal, 9(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/01-raney.php>.

I. First Brexit, then Trump: Has the past year or so ushered in a “wave” (Weisberg), a “barrage” (Desmond-Harris) or a “deluge” (Sidahmed) of that notoriously noxious affect, hate? It certainly feels that way to those of us identified with progressive social and political causes—those of us troubled, not just by Trump’s recent electoral victory, but by the far-right forces to which that victory has given voice. And yet the questions still hanging over efforts to quantify emotional or affective states leaves the claim that there has been a clear spike in hate moot (Ngai 26; Massumi 136-7; Ahmed, Promise 3-8). So let’s try asking a different question. Has this same period seen a rise, across liberal media platforms, in the rhetorical work of “hate-attribution”? Here, at least, an answer seems in readier reach. For no one given to scrolling distractedly through liberal Anglophone media outlets, from The New York Times, to The Guardian, to Slate, will be unfamiliar with a species of journalism that, in reporting the appalling activities associated with what has become known as the “alt-right” (Main; Wallace-Wells; Gourarie), articulates those activities in the rubric of a calculable uptick in hate itself.Before the U.S. Presidential election, this fledgling journalistic genre was already testing its wings, its first shudderings felt everywhere from Univision anchor Jorge Ramos’s widely publicized documentary, Hate Rising (2016), which explores the rise of white supremacist movements across the South-West U.S, to an edition of Slate’s Trumpcast entitled “The Alt-Right and a Deluge of Hate,” which broached the torment-by-Twitter of left-wing journalist David French. In the wake of the election, and the appalling acts of harassment and intimidation it seemed to authorize, the genre gained further momentum—leading to the New Yorker’s “Hate Is on the Rise After Trump’s Election,” to The Guardian’s “Trump’s Election led to Barrage of Hate,” and to Vox’s “The Wave of Post-Election Hate Reportedly Sweeping the Nation, Explained.” And it still has traction today, judging not just by James King’s recent year-in-review column, “The Year in Hate: From Donald Trump to the Rise of the Alt-Right,” but by Salon’s “A Short History of Hate” which tracks the alt-right’s meteoric 2016 rise to prominence, and the New York Times’ recently launched hate-speech aggregator, “This Week in Hate.”As should already be clear from these brisk, thumbnail accounts of the texts in question, the phenomena alluded to by the titular term “hate” are not instances of hate per se, but rather instances of “hate-speech.” The word “hate,” in other words, is being deployed here not literally, to refer to an emotional state, but metonymically, as a shorthand for “hate-speech”—a by-now widely conventionalized and legally codified parlance originating with the U.N. Declaration to describe “violent or violence-inciting speech or acts that “aim or intend to inflict injury, or incite prejudice or hatred, against persons of groups” because of their ethnic, religious, sexual or social affiliation. And there is no doubt that, beyond the headlines, these articles do incredibly important work, drawing connections between, and drawing attention to, a host of harmful activities associated with the so-called “alt-right”—from a pair of mangled, pretzel-shaped swastikas graffiti-ed in a children’s playground, to acts of harassment, intimidation and violence against women, African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims, Jews, and LGBTQ people, to Trump’s own racist, xenophobic and misogynistic tweets. Yet the fact that an emotion-term like hate is being mobilized across these texts as a metonym for the “alt-right” is no oratorical curio. Rather, it perpetuates a pervasive way of thinking about the relationship between the alt-right (a political phenomenon) and hate (an emotional phenomenon) that should give pause to those of us committed to mining that vein of cultural symptomatology now consigned, across the social sciences and critical humanities, to affect theory. Specifically, these headlines inscribe, in miniature, a kind of micro-assessment, a micro-geography and micro-theory of hate. First, they suggest that, even prior to its incarnation in specific, and dangerous, forms of speech or action, hate is in and of itself anathema, a phenomenon so unquestioningly dangerous that a putative “rise” or “spike” in its net presence provides ample pretext for a news headline. Second, they propose that hate may be localized to a particular social or political group—a group subsisting, unsurprisingly, on that peculiarly contested frontier between the ideological alt-right and the American Midwest. And third, they imply that hate is so indubitably the single most significant source of the xenophobic, racist and sexist activities they go on to describe that it may be casually used as these activities’ lexical proxy. What is crystallizing here, I suggest, is what scholars of rhetoric dub a rhetorical “constellation” (Campbell and Jamieson 332)—a constellation from which hate emerges as, a) inherently problematic, b) localizable to the “alt-right,” and, c) the primary engine of the various activities and expressions we associate with them. This constellation of conventions for thinking about hate and its relationship to the activities of right-wing extremist movement has coalesced into a “genre” we might dub the genre of “hate-attribution.” Yet while it’s far from clear that the genre is an effective one in a political landscape that’s fast becoming a political battleground, it hasn’t appeared by chance. Treating “hate,” then, less as a descriptive “grid of analysis” (Sedgwick 152), than as a rhetorical projectile, this essay opens by interrogating the “hate-attribution” genre’s logic and querying its efficacy. Having done so, it approaches the concept of “alternatives” by asking: how might calling time on the genre help us think differently about both hate itself and about the forces catalyzing, and catalyzed by, Trump’s presidential campaign? II.The rhetorical power of the genre of hate-attribution, of course, isn’t too difficult to pin down. An emotion so thoroughly discredited that its assignment is now in and of itself a term of abuse (see, for example, the O.E.D’s freshly-expanded definition of the noun “hater”), hate is an emotion the Judeo-Christian tradition deems not just responsible for but practically akin to murder (John 3:1). In part as a result of this tradition, hate has proven thoroughly resistant to efforts to elevate it from the status of an expression of a subject’s pestiferous inner life to the status of a polemical response to an object in the world. Indeed, while a great deal of the critical energy amassing under the rubric of “affect theory” has recently been put into recuperating the strategic or diagnostic value of emotions long scorned as irrelevant to oppositional struggle—from irritation and envy, to depression, anger and shame (Ngai; Cvetkovich; Gould; Love)—hate has notably not been among them. In fact, those rare scholarly accounts of affect that do address “hate,” notably Ahmed’s excellent work on right-wing extremist groups in the United Kingdom, display an understandable reluctance to rehabilitate it for progressive thought (Cultural Politics). It should come as no surprise, then, that the genre of “hate-attribution” has a rare rhetorical power. In identifying “hate” as the source of a particular position, gesture or speech-act, we effectively drain said position, gesture or speech-act of political agency or representational power—reducing it from an at-least-potentially polemical action in or response to the world, to the histrionic expression of a reprehensible personhood. Yet because hate’s near-taboo status holds across the ideological and political spectrum, what is less clear is why the genre of hate-attribution has achieved such cachet in the liberal media in particular. The answer, I would argue, lies in the fact that the work of hate-attribution dovetails all too neatly with liberal political theory’s longstanding tendency to laminate its social and civic ideals to affective ideals like “love,” “sympathy,” “compassion,” and, when in a less demonstrative humor, “tolerance”. As Martha Nussbaum’s Political Emotions has recently shown, this tradition has an impressive philosophical pedigree, running from Aristotle’s philia (16), John Locke’s “toleration” and David Hume’s “sympathy” (69-75), to the twentieth century’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with its promotion of “tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups.” And while the labour of what Lauren Berlant calls “liberal sentimentality” (“Poor Eliza”, 636) has never quite died away, it does seem to have found new strength with the emergence of the “intimate public sphere” (Berlant, Queen)—from its recent popular apotheosis in the Clinton campaign’s notorious “Love Trumps Hate” (a slogan in which “love,” unfortunately, came to look a lot like resigned technocratic quietism in the face of ongoing economic and environmental crisis [Zizek]), to its revival as a philosophical project among progressive scholars, many of them under the sway of the so-called “affective turn” (Nussbaum; Hardt; Sandoval; hooks). No surprise, then, that liberalism’s struggle to yoke itself to “love” should have as its eerie double a struggle to locate among its ideological and political enemies an increasingly reified “hate”. And while the examples of this project we’ve touched on so far have hailed from popular media, this set of protocols for thinking about hate and its relationship to the activities of right-wing extremist movements is not unique to media circles. It’s there in political discourse, as in ex-DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s announcement, on MSNBC, that “Americans will unite against [Trump’s] hatred.” And it’s there, too, in academic media studies, from FLOW journal’s November 2016 call for papers inviting respondents to comment, among other things, on “the violence and hatred epitomized by Trump and his supporters,” to the SCMS conference’s invitation to members to participate in a pop-up panel entitled “Responding to Hate, Disenfranchisement and the Loss of the Commons.” Yet while the labor of hate-attribution to which many progressive forces have become attached carries an indisputable rhetorical force, it also has some profound rhetorical flaws. The very same stigma, after all, that makes “hate” such a powerful explanatory grenade to throw also makes it an incredibly tough one to land. As Ahmed’s analysis of the online rhetoric of white supremacist organizations should remind us (Cultural Politics), most groups structured around inciting and promoting violence against women and minorities identify, perversely, not as hate groups, but as movements propelled by the love of race and nation. And while left-wing pundits pronounce “hate” the signature emotion of a racist, misogynist Trump-voting right, supporters of Trump ascribe it, just as routinely, to the so-called “liberal elite,” a group whose mythical avatars—from the so-called “Social Justice Warrior” or “SJW,” to the supercilious Washington politico—are said to brand “ordinary [white, male] Americans” indiscriminately as racist, misogynistic, homophobic buffoons. Thus, for example, The Washington Post’s uncanny, far-right journalistic alter-ego, The Washington Times, dubs the SPLC a “liberal hate group”; the Wikipedia mirror-site, Conservapedia, recasts liberal objections to gun violence as “liberal hate speech” driven by an “irrational aversion to weapons”; while one blood-curdling sub-genre of reportage on Steve Bannon’s crypto-fascist soapbox, Breitbart News, is devoted to denouncing what it calls “ ‘anti-White Racism.’” It’s easy enough, of course, to defend the hate-attribution genre’s liberal incarnations while dismissing its right-wing variants as cynical, opportunistic shams, as Ahmed does (Cultural Politics)—thereby re-establishing the wellspring of hate where we are most comfortable locating it: among our political others. Yet to do so seems, in some sense, to perpetuate a familiar volley of hate-attribution. And to the extent that, as many media scholars have shown (Philips; Reed; Tett; Turow), our digital, networked political landscape is in danger of being reduced to a silo-ed discursive battleground, the ritual exchange of terminological grenades that everyone seems eager to propel across ideological lines, but that no one, understandably, seems willing to pick up, seems counter-productive to say the least.Even beyond the genre’s ultimate ineffectiveness, what should strike anyone used to reflecting on affect is how little justice it does to the ubiquity and intricacy of “hate” as an affective phenomenon. Hate is not and cannot be the exclusive property or preserve of one side of the political spectrum. One doesn’t have to stretch one’s critical faculties too far to see the extent to which the genre of hate-attribution participates in the emotional ballistics it condemns or seeks to redress. While trafficking in a relatively simple hate-paradigm (as a subjective emotional state that may be isolated to a particular person or group), the genre itself incarnates a more complex, socially dynamic model of hate in which the emotion operates through logics of projection perhaps best outlined by Freud. In the “hate-attribution” genre, that is, hate—like those equally abjected categories “sentimentality,” “worldliness” or “knowingness” broached by Sedgwick in her bravura analyses of “scapegoating attribution” (150-158)—finds its clearest expression in and through the labor of its own adscription. And it should come as no surprise that an emotion so widely devalued, where it is not openly prohibited, might also find expression in less overt form.Yet to say as much is by no means to discredit the genre. As legal scholar Jeremy Waldron has recently pointed out, there’s no particular reason why “the passions and emotions that lie behind a particular speech act” (34)—even up to and including hate—should devalue the speech acts they rouse. On the contrary, to pin the despicable and damaging activities of the so-called “alt right” on “hate” is, if anything, to do an injustice to a rich and complex emotion that can be as generative as it can be destructive. As Freud suggests in “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” for example, hate may be the very seed of love, since the forms of “social feeling” (121) celebrated under the liberal rubric of “tolerance,” “love,” and “compassion,” are grounded in “the reversal of what was first a hostile feeling into a positively-toned tie in the nature of an identification” (121; italics mine). Indeed, Freud projects this same argument across a larger, historical canvas in Civilization and its Discontents, which contends that it is in our very struggle to combat our “aggressive instincts” that human communities have developed “methods intended to incite people into identifications and aim-inhibited relationships of love” (31). For Freud, that is, the practice of love is a function of ongoing efforts to see hate harnessed, commuted and transformed. III.What might it mean, then, to call time on this round of hate-attribution? What sort of “alternatives” might emerge when we abandon the assumption that political engagement entails a “struggle over who has the right to declare themselves as acting out of love” (Ahmed, Cultural Politics 131), and thus, by that same token, a struggle over the exact location and source of hate? One boon, I suggest, is the license it gives those of us on the progressive left to simply own our own hate. There’s little doubt that reframing the dangerous and destructive forms of speech fomented by Trump’s campaign, not as eruptions of hate, or even as “hate-speech,” but as speech we hate would be more consistent with what once seemed affect theory’s first commandment: to take our own affective temperature before launching headlong into critical analysis. After all, when Lauren Berlant (“Trump”) takes a stab at economist Paul Krugman’s cautions against “the Danger of Political Emotions” with the timely reminder that “all the messages are emotional,” the “messages” she’s pointing to aren’t just those of our political others, they’re ours; and the “emotions” she’s pointing to aren’t just the evacuated, insouciant versions of love championed by the Clinton campaign, they’re of the messier, or as Ngai might put it, “uglier” (2) variety—from shame, depression and anger, to, yes, I want to insist, hate.By way of jump-starting this program of hate-avowal, then, let me just say it: this essay was animated, in part, by a certain kind of hate. The social critic in me hates the breathtaking simplification of the complex social, economic and emotional forces animating Trump voters that seem to actuate some liberal commentary; the psychologist in me hates the self-mystification palpable in the left’s insistence on projecting and thus disowning its own (often very well justified) aggressions; and the human being in me, hating the kind of toxic speech to which Trump’s campaign has given rise, wishes to be able to openly declare that hatred. Among its other effects, hate is characterized by hypervigilance for lapses or failings in an object it deems problematic, a hypervigilance that—sometimes—animates analysis (Zeki and Romoya). In this sense, “hate” seems entitled to a comfortable place in the ranks of what Nick Salvato has recently dubbed criticism’s creative “obstructions”—phenomena that, while “routinely identified as detriments” to critical inquiry, may also “form the basis for … critical thinking” (1).Yet while one boon associated with this disclosure might be a welcome intellectual honesty, a more significant boon, I’d argue, is what getting this disclosure out of the way might leave room for. Opting out of the game of hurling “hate” back and forth across a super-charged political arena, that is, we might devote our column inches and Facebook posts to the less sensational but more productive task of systematically challenging the specious claims, and documenting the damaging effects, of a species of utterance (Butler; Matsuda; Waldron) we’ve grown used to simply descrying as pure, distilled “hate”. And we also might do something else. Relieved of the confident conviction that we can track “Trumpism” to a spontaneous outbreak of a single, localizable emotion, we might be able to offer a fuller account of the economic, social, political and affective forces that energize it. Certainly, hate plays a part here—although the process by which, as Isabelle Stengers puts it, affect “make[s] present, vivid and mattering … a worldly world” (371) demands that we scrutinize that hate as a syndrome, rather than simply moralize it as a sin, addressing its mainsprings in a moment marked by the nerve-fraying and life-fraying effects of what has become known across the social sciences and critical humanities as conditions of social and economic “precarity” (Muehlebach; Neil and Rossiter; Stewart).But perhaps hate’s not the only emotion tucked away under the hood. Here’s something affect theory knows today: affect moves not, as more traditional theorists of political emotion have it, “unambiguously and predictably from one’s cognitive processing,” but in ways that are messy, muddled and indirect (Gould 24). That form of speech is speech we hate. But it may not be “hate speech.” That crime is a crime we hate. But it may not be a “hate-crime.” One of the critical tactics we might crib from Berlant’s work in Cruel Optimism is that of decoding and decrypting, in even the most hateful acts, an instance of what Berlant, herself optimistically, calls “optimism.” For Berlant, after all, optimism is very often cruel, attaching itself, as it seems to have done in 2016, to scenes, objects and people that, while ultimately destined to “imped[e] the aim that brought [it to them] initially,” nevertheless came to seem, to a good portion of the electorate, the only available exponent of that classic good-life genre, “the change that’s gonna come” (“Trump” 1-2) at a moment when the Democratic party’s primary campaign promise was more of the free-market same. 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Introduction 2021 was the year that NFTs got big—not just in value but also in terms of the cultural consciousness. When digital artist Beeple sold the portfolio of his 5,000 daily images at Christie’s for US$69 million, the art world was left intrigued, confused, and outraged in equal measure. Depending on who you asked, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) seemed to be either a quick cash-grab or the future of the art market (Bowden and Jones; Smee). Following the Beeple sale, articles started to appear indicating that the film industry was abuzz for NFTs. Independent filmmaker Kevin Smith was quick to announce that he planned to release his horror film Killroy Was Here as an NFT (Alexander); in September 2021 the James Bond film No Time to Die also unveiled a series of collectibles to coincide with the film’s much-delayed theatrical release (Natalee); the distribution and collectible platforms Vuele, NFT Studios, and Mogul Productions all emerged, and the industry rumour mill suggests more start-ups are en route (CurrencyWorks; NFT Studios; NewsBTC). Blockchain disciples say that the technology will solve all the problems of the Internet (Tewari; Norton; European Business Review); critics say it will only perpetuate existing accessibility and equality issues (Davis and Flatow; Klein). Those more circumspect will doubtless sit back until the dust settles, waiting to see what parts of so-called web3 will be genuinely integrated into the architecture of the Internet. Pamela Hutchinson puts it neatly in terms of the arts sector: “the NFT may revolutionise the art market, film funding and distribution. Or it might be an ecological disaster and a financial bubble, in which few actual movies change hands, and fraudsters get rich from other people’s intellectual property” (Hutchinson). There is an uptick in the literature around NFTs and blockchain (see Quiniou; Gayvoronskaya & Meinel); however, the technology remains unregulated and unstandardised (Yeung 212-14; Dimitropoulos 112-13). Similarly, the sheer amount of funding being put into fundamental technical, data, and security-related issues speaks volumes to the nascency of the space (Ossinger; Livni; Gayvoronskaya & Meinel 52-6). Put very briefly, NFTs are part of a given blockchain system; think of them, like cryptocurrency coins, as “units of value” within that system (Roose). NFTs were initially rolled out on Ethereum, though several other blockchains have now implemented their own NFT frameworks. NFTs are usually not the artwork itself, but rather a unique, un-copyable (hence, non-fungible) piece of code that is attached, linked, or connected to another digital file, be that an image, video, text, or something else entirely. NFTs are often referred to as a digital artwork’s “certificate of authenticity” (Roose). At the time of writing, it remains to be seen how widely blockchain and NFT technology will be implemented across the entertainment industries. However, this article aims to outline the current state of implementation in the film trade specifically, and to attempt to sort true potential from the hype. Beginning with an overview of the core issues around blockchain and NFTs as they apply to film properties and adjacent products, current implementations of the technology are outlined, before finishing with a hesitant glimpse into the potential future applications. The Issues and Conversation At the core of current conversations around blockchain are three topics: intellectual property and ownership, concentrations of power and control, and environmental impact. To this I would like to add a consideration of social capital, which I begin with briefly here. Both the film industry and “crypto” — if we take the latter to encompass the various facets of so-called ‘web3’ — are engines of social capital. In the case of cinema, its products are commodified and passed through a model that begins with exclusivity (theatrical release) before progressing to mass availability (home media, streaming). The cinematic object, i.e., an individual copy of a film, is, by virtue of its origins as a mass product of the twentieth century, fungible. The film is captured, copied, stored, distributed, and shared. The film-industrial model has always relied on social phenomena, word of mouth, critical discourse, and latterly on buzz across digital social media platforms. This is perhaps as distinct from fine art, where — at least for dealers — the content of the piece does not necessarily matter so much as verification of ownership and provenance. Similarly, web3, with its decentralised and often-anonymised processes, relies on a kind of social activity, or at least a recorded interaction wherein the chain is stamped and each iteration is updated across the system. Even without the current hype, web3 still relies a great deal on discourse, sharing, and community, particularly as it flattens the existing hierarchies of the Internet that linger from Web 2.0. In terms of NFTs, blockchain systems attach scarcity and uniqueness to digital objects. For now, that scarcity and uniqueness is resulting in financial value, though as Jonathan Beller argues the notion of value could — or perhaps should — be reconsidered as blockchain technology, and especially cryptocurrencies, evolve (Beller 217). Regardless, NFT advocates maintain that this is the future of all online activity. To questions of copyright, the structures of blockchain do permit some level of certainty around where a given piece of intellectual property emerged. This is particularly useful where there are transnational differences in recognition of copyright law, such as in France, for instance (Quiniou 112-13). The Berne Convention stipulates that “the subsistence of copyright does not rest on the compliance with formal requirements: rights will exist if the work meets the requirements for protection set out by national law and treaties” (Guadamuz 1373). However, there are still no legal structures underpinning even the most transparent of transactions, when an originator goes out of their way to transfer rights to the buyer of the accompanying NFT. The minimum requirement — even courtesy — for the assignment of rights is the identification of the work itself; as Guadamuz notes, this is tricky for NFTs as they are written in code (1374). The blockchain’s openness and transparency are its key benefits, but until the code can explicitly include (or concretely and permanently reference) the ‘content’ of an NFT, its utility as a system of ownership is questionable. Decentralisation, too, is raised consistently as a key positive characteristic of blockchain technology. Despite the energy required for this decentralisation (addressed shortly), it is true that, at least in its base code, blockchain is a technology with no centralised source of truth or verification. Instead, such verification is performed by every node on the chain. On the surface, for the film industry, this might mean modes of financing, rights management, and distribution chains that are not beholden to multinational media conglomerates, streamers like Netflix, niche intermediaries, or legacy studios. The result here would be a flattening of the terrain: breaking down studio and corporate gatekeeping in favour of a more democratised creative landscape. Creators and creative teams would work peer-to-peer, paying, contracting, servicing, and distribution via the blockchain, with iron-clad, publicly accessible tracking of transactions and ownership. The alternative, though, is that the same imbalances persist, just in a different form: this is outlined in the next section. As Hunter Vaughan writes, the film industry’s environmental impact has long been under-examined. Its practices are diverse, distributed, and hard to quantify. Cinematic images, Vaughan writes, “do not come from nothing, and they do not vanish into the air: they have always been generated by the earth and sun, by fossil fuels and chemical reactions, and our enjoyment of them has material consequences” (3). We believe that by watching a “green” film like Avatar we are doing good, but it implicates us in the dirty secret, an issue of “ignorance and of voluntary psychosis” where “we do not see who we are harming or how these practices are affecting the environment, and we routinely agree to accept the virtual as real” (5). Beyond questions of implication and eco-material conceptualisation, however, there are stark facts. In the 1920s, the Kodak Park Plant in New York drew 12 million gallons of water from Lake Ontario each day to produce film stock. As the twentieth century came to a close, this amount — for a single film plant — had grown to 35-53 million gallons per day. The waste water was perfunctorily “cleaned” and then dumped into surrounding rivers (72-3). This was just one plant, and one part of the filmmaking process. With the shift to digital, this cost might now be calculated in the extraction of precious metals used to make contemporary cameras, computers, or storage devices. Regardless, extrapolate outwards to a global film industry and one quickly realises the impact is almost beyond comprehension. Considering — let alone calculating — the carbon footprint of blockchain requires outlining some fundamentals of the technology. The two primary architectures of blockchain are Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS), both of which denote methods of adding and verifying new blocks to a chain. PoW was the first model, employed by Bitcoin and the first iteration of Ethereum. In a PoW model, each new block has a specific cryptographic hash. To confirm the new block, crypto miners use their systems to generate a target hash that is less than or equal to that of the block. The systems process these calculations quickly, as the goal is to be “the first miner with the target hash because that miner is the one who can update the blockchain and receive crypto rewards” (Daly). The race for block confirmation necessitates huge amounts of processing power to make these quick calculations. The PoS model differs in that miners are replaced by validators (or staking services where participants pool validation power). Rather than investing in computer power, validators invest in the blockchain’s coins, staking those coins (tokens) in a smart contract (think of this contract like a bank account or vault). When a new block is proposed, an algorithm chooses a validator based on the size of their stake; if the block is verified, the validator receives further cryptocurrency as a reward (Castor). Given the ubiquity and exponential growth of blockchain technology and its users, an accurate quantification of its carbon footprint is difficult. For some precedent, though, one might consider the impact of the Bitcoin blockchain, which runs on a PoW model. As the New York Times so succinctly puts it: “the process of creating Bitcoin to spend or trade consumes around 91 terawatt-hours of electricity annually, more than is used by Finland, a nation of about 5.5 million” (Huang, O’Neill and Tabuchi). The current Ethereum system (at time of writing), where the majority of NFT transactions take place, also runs on PoW, and it is estimated that a single Ethereum transaction is equivalent to nearly nine days of power consumption by an average US household (Digiconomist). Ethereum always intended to operate on a PoS system, and the transition to this new model is currently underway (Castor). Proof of Stake transactions use significantly less energy — the new Ethereum will supposedly be approximately 2,000 times more energy efficient (Beekhuizen). However, newer systems such as Solana have been explicit about their efficiency goals, stating that a single Solana transaction uses less energy (1,837 Joules, to be precise) than keeping an LED light on for one hour (36,000 J); one Ethereum transaction, for comparison, uses over 692 million J (Solana). In addition to energy usage, however, there is also the question of e-waste as a result of mining and general blockchain operations which, at the time of writing, for Bitcoin sits at around 32 kilotons per year, around the same as the consumer IT wastage of the Netherlands (de Vries and Stoll). How the growth in NFT awareness and adoption amplifies this impact remains to be seen, but depending on which blockchain they use, they may be wasting energy and resources by design. If using a PoW model, the more valuable the cryptocurrency used to make the purchase, the more energy (“gas”) required to authenticate the purchase across the chain. Images abound online of jerry-rigged crypto data centres of varying quality (see also efficiency and safety). With each NFT minted, sold, or traded, these centres draw — and thus waste, for gas — more and more energy. With increased public attention and scrutiny, cryptocurrencies are slowly realising that things could be better. As sustainable alternatives become more desirable and mainstream, it is safe to predict that many NFT marketplaces may migrate to Cardano, Solana, or other more efficient blockchain bases. For now, though, this article considers the existing implementations of NFTs and blockchain technology within the film industry. Current Implementations The current applications of NFTs in film centre around financing and distribution. In terms of the former, NFTs are saleable items that can raise capital for production, distribution, or marketing. As previously mentioned, director Kevin Smith launched Jay & Silent Bob’s Crypto Studio in order to finish and release Killroy Was Here. Smith released over 600 limited edition tokens, including one of the film itself (Moore). In October 2021, renowned Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai sold an NFT with unreleased footage from his film In the Mood for Love at Sotheby’s for US$550,000 (Raybaud). Quentin Tarantino entered the arena in January 2022, auctioning uncut scenes from his 1994 film Pulp Fiction, despite the threat of legal action from the film’s original distributor Miramax (Dailey). In Australia, an early adopter of the technology is director Michael Beets, who works in virtual production and immersive experiences. His immersive 14-minute VR film Nezunoban (2020) was split into seven different chapters, and each chapter was sold as an NFT. Beets also works with artists to develop entry tickets that are their own piece of generative art; with these tickets and the chapters selling for hundreds of dollars at a time, Beets seems to have achieved the impossible: turning a profit on a short film (Fletcher). Another Australian writer-producer, Samuel Wilson, now based in Canada, suggests that the technology does encourage filmmakers to think differently about what they create: At the moment, I’m making NFTs from extra footage of my feature film Miles Away, which will be released early next year. In one way, it’s like a new age of behind-the-scenes/bonus features. I have 14 hours of DV tapes that I’m cutting into a short film which I will then sell in chapters over the coming months. One chapter will feature the dashing KJ Apa (Songbird, Riverdale) without his shirt on. So, hopefully that can turn some heads. (Wilson, in Fletcher) In addition to individual directors, a number of startup companies are also seeking to get in on the action. One of these is Vuele, which is best understood as a blockchain-based streaming service: an NFT Netflix, if you like. In addition to films themselves, the service will offer extra content as NFTs, including “behind the scenes content, bonus features, exclusive Q&As, and memorabilia” (CurrencyWorks). Vuele’s launch title is Zero Contact, directed by Rick Dugdale and starring Anthony Hopkins. The film is marketed as “the World’s First NFT Feature Film” (as at the time of writing, though, both Vuele and its flagship film have yet to launch). Also launching is NFT Studios, a blockchain-based production company that distributes the executive producer role to those buying into the project. NFT Studios is a decentralised administrative organisation (DAO), guided by tech experts, producers, and film industry intermediaries. NFT Studios is launching with A Wing and a Prayer, a biopic of aeronaut Brian Milton (NFT Studios), and will announce their full slate across festivals in 2022. In Australia, Culture Vault states that its aim is to demystify crypto and champion Australian artists’ rights and access to the space. Co-founder and CEO Michelle Grey is well aware of the aforementioned current social capital of NFTs, but is also acutely aware of the space’s opacity and the ubiquity of often machine-generated tat. “The early NFT space was in its infancy, there was a lot of crap around, but don’t forget there’s a lot of garbage in the traditional art world too,” she says (cited in Miller). Grey and her company effectively act like art dealers; intermediaries between the tech and art worlds. These new companies claim to be adhering to the principles of web3, often selling themselves as collectives, DAOs, or distributed administrative systems. But the entrenched tendencies of the film industry — particularly the persistent Hollywood system — are not so easily broken down. Vuele is a joint venture between CurrencyWorks and Enderby Entertainment. The former is a financial technology company setting up blockchain systems for businesses, including the establishment of branded digital currencies such as the controversial FreedomCoin (Memoria); the latter, Enderby, is a production company founded by Canadian film producer (and former investor relations expert in the oil and uranium sectors) Rick Dugdale (Wiesner). Similarly, NFT Studios is partnered with consulting and marketing agencies and blockchain venture capitalists (NFT Investments PLC). Depending on how charitable or cynical one is feeling, these start-ups are either helpful intermediaries to facilitate legacy media moving into NFT technology, or the first bricks in the capitalist wall to bar access for entry to other players. The Future Is… Buffering Marketplaces like Mintable, OpenSea, and Rarible do indeed make the minting and selling of NFTs fairly straightforward — if you’ve ever listed an item for sale on eBay or Facebook, you can probably mint an NFT. Despite this, the current major barrier for average punters to the NFT space remains technical knowledge. The principles of blockchain remain fairly opaque — even this author, who has been on a deep dive for this article, remains sceptical that widespread adoption across multiple applications and industries is feasible. Even so, as Rennie notes, “the unknown is not what blockchain technology is, or even what it is for (there are countless ‘use cases’), but how it structures the actions of those who use it” (235). At the time of writing, a great many commentators and a small handful of scholars are speculating about the role of the metaverse in the creative space. If the endgame of the metaverse is realised, i.e., a virtual, interactive space where users can interact, trade, and consume entertainment, the role of creators, dealers, distributors, and other brokers and players will be up-ended, and have to re-settle once again. Film industry practitioners might look to the games space to see what the road might look like, but then again, in an industry that is — at its best — somewhat resistant to change, this may simply be a fad that blows over. Blockchain’s current employment as a get-rich-quick mechanism for the algorithmic literati and as a computational extension of existing power structures suggests nothing more than another techno-bubble primed to burst (Patrickson 591-2; Klein). Despite the aspirational commentary surrounding distributed administrative systems and organisations, the current implementations are restricted, for now, to startups like NFT Studios. In terms of cinema, it does remain to be seen whether the deployment of NFTs will move beyond a kind of “Netflix with tchotchkes” model, or a variant of crowdfunding with perks. Once Vuele and NFT Studios launch properly, we may have a sense of how this all will play out, particularly alongside less corporate-driven, more artistically-minded initiatives like that of Michael Beets and Culture Vault. It is possible, too, that blockchain technology may streamline the mechanics of the industry in terms of automating or simplifying parts of the production process, particularly around contracts, financing, licensing. This would obviously remove some of the associated labour and fees, but would also de-couple long-established parts and personnel of the industry — would Hollywood and similar industrial-entertainment complexes let this happen? As with any of the many revolutions that have threatened to kill or resurrect the (allegedly) long-suffering cinematic object, we just have to wait, and watch. References Alexander, Bryan. “Kevin Smith Reveals Why He’s Auctioning Off New His Film ‘Killroy Was Here’ as an NFT.” USA TODAY, 15 Apr. 2021. <https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2021/04/15/kevin-smith-auctioning-new-film-nft-killroy-here/7244602002/>. Beekhuizen, Carl. “Ethereum’s Energy Usage Will Soon Decrease by ~99.95%.” Ethereum Foundation Blog, 18 May 2021. <https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/05/18/country-power-no-more/>. Beller, Jonathan. “Economic Media: Crypto and the Myth of Total Liquidity.” Australian Humanities Review 66 (2020): 215-225. Beller, Jonathan. The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College P, 2006. 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Spurred by global institutions and treaties such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and its’ bantling the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the past three decades have seen many nations of the world develop an economic interconnectedness that parallels the great free trade movement of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. Free trade and the resultant economic ‘globalisation’ have had mixed results for many countries and groups within countries and has incited a complex, inarticulate, and sometimes contradictory debate across all segments of our society. Some groups and geographical locales have benefited handsomely from the structural changes that we generally understand as globalisation, whilst other groups and geographical regions have become economically marginalised through disconnectedness from global flows of money and goods and services. Rural and regional Australia, for instance, has experienced a steady decline in recent years and in fact in rural Victoria, a gloomy report from the Bureau of Statistics, suggests that not one new full-time job has been created in more than thirteen years (Colbatch). In other parts of the country, particularly Sydney and Melbourne, things could not seem better; property values have doubled, unemployment is at record lows, and the new middle classes cram the cafés of the gentrified inner-cities. Wages have risen by up to fifty percent in many of Australia’s inner cities during the late 1990s (Birnbauer and Gurrera). By the end of the 1990s, in response to some of the inequalities of globalisation—particularly between developed and developing countries—a large globally-linked protest movement arose out of Seattle in the United States. The movement formed as a protest against the policies of the WTO and was an eclectic arrangement of political groups who believed that free trade was not the answer to a more equitable world. The problem was that some of the leading thinkers of the movement—in a movement that claimed to have no leaders—were far too short-sighted to see beyond the popular zeitgeist of the time. The turn of the century zeitgeist was based on a well-meaning utopian-libertarian vision of a frictionless and equitable world. The problem was that this vision had no place for nations and thus citizen-based democratically elected national governments. There had apparently been a coup and governments were now captured by shoe manufacturers. One of the best-known authors of the turn of the century globalisation protest movement was the inner-city Canadian journalist Naomi Klein with her popularly acclaimed book No Logo (Klein). Although shrewdly timed, there was nothing particularly ground-breaking about Klein’s work; anxieties about corporate power, exploited workers, and the power of the ideologically potent media industries have for most of the Twentieth Century been the focus of relations between governments and the private sphere everywhere. The book relied heavily on the popular journalistic branding of the time, the ‘new economy’, which was believed to be represented by the industries of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector, advertising, and shoe manufacturers. The new economy never existed; it was merely a popularly accepted business-journalism term that perhaps described parts of the more complex corpus of work on ‘post-industrialism’. Many thinkers have been attempting to understand issues of equity and post-industrialism for more than three decades; perhaps one the best-known authors in Australia is the ex-Labor minister Barry Jones with his celebrated 1982 book Sleeper Wake; Technology and the Future of Work (Jones). The turn of the century globalisation protest movement was in essence a utopian-libertarian movement and even at times claimed to be ‘natural’ and ‘leaderless’. Pithily, the WTO could also be described as ‘utopian-libertarian’ as much of its post-war ideological base stems from the belief that national borders are a hindrance (and the world would be better without them), and national governments should not interfere with its ‘natural’ globalisation schema. The ‘global’ just like the ‘nation’ is an unwieldy meta-structure and can be interpreted in many ways and for many ends. The minimal working definitions of globalisation, or dare I say ‘globalism’, circulate around the processes in which complex interconnections are said to be rapidly developing between societies, institutions, cultures, collectives, and individuals worldwide. These connections are believed to be between cultural, political, and economic practices that are local, national, technological, and corporate. And if there really is such a thing as globalisation, then it is far from a ‘natural’ process, but has developed as the direct result of strategic choices by governments and corporations in the past thirty years. In Australia, our engagement with the dominant form of globalisation was exacerbated by the Hawke/Keating Labor governments (1984-1996) that deregulated large portions of the economy, floated our currency, and embraced the all-trade-is-good mantra of global economic policy. Not surprisingly, the rich countries define the dominant ideologies of globalisation and corporations are the main catalyst (Everend). Many corporations are involved in cultural production thus creating their own world culture and value system. This value system is based on consumerism (like buying sports shoes) and the triumph of individual consumer agency over collective economic practices (like free education). The end of the east-west logic of the Cold War ended the eighty-year ideological wrestle between centralised state economic planning and market driven models. Eric Hobsbawn, in his masterful empirical history, The Age of Extremes, claims that what we understand as the Twentieth Century ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union (Hobsbawn). What we are left with is a world with only one major superpower, one major economic model, and one major Liberal ideology that is increasing the wealth gap between and within societies everywhere (Landes). We do need to urgently understand the forces beyond the nation state, but this should not be at the expense of a political engagement with the democratic processes that make up the nation state. The utopian-libertarian critique of the turn of the century globalisation protest movement was far too simplistic. The Twentieth Century often disastrously taught us that ideas of the nation can be interpreted in many ways, and likewise, ideas of ‘the global’ are contested meta-structures that can be multifariously interpreted. There are no effortless solutions to understanding globalisation processes and those that tell us what the ‘global’ is largely control what it is. This is similar to the history of Australia. Historically Australia has had different ways to see ourselves based on what group has been in power and the particular requirements of this group. The requirements of an elite group of Australians at the moment is perhaps no government at all so that ‘the people’ can consume in peace and not have bothersome local governments do nasty ‘state-authoritarian’ things like build kindergartens or repair street lights. If ‘the people’ loose faith in citizen based democracy then we undermine the only real power that we have as individuals. The simple act of many activists to communicate between various countries and exchange ideas and strategies is not end in itself; it is merely one component of a significant beginning. If we don’t have a major war, or an economic catastrophe, globalisation will probably further arrive over the next few decades. And we need to have representative, fair, collective and geographically specific processes to deal with this. Most of the collective institutional solutions we already have, and it is up to a new generation to take control of their democratic inheritance (like every other generation before us) rather than conjure one-dimensional utopian-libertarian visions that are oppressively close to those of the WTO. Works Cited www.milkbar.com.au Birnbauer, William and Guerrera, Orietta “Rich Shun Easter Suburbs for Inner City” in The Age, Melbourne, June 18. 2002, <http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/06/17/1023864403482.php> (Accessed 11 May, 2003) Colbatch, Tim “Part-time work spawns rural underclass” in The Age, 26 April 2003, <http://www.theage.com.au/text/articles/2003/04/25/1050777401... ...309.htm> (Accessed 27 April, 2003) Everand, Jerry Virtual States: The Internet and the Boundaries of the Nation State,Routledge, London, 2000. Hobsbawn, Eric Age of Extremes: The short Twentieth Century 1914-1991, Abacus, London, 1994. Jones, Barry Sleepers Wake: Technology and the Future of Work, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1982. Klein, Naomi No Logo, Flamingo, London, 2000. Landes, Richard S The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, WW Norton, New York, 1999. Links http://www.milkbar.com.au http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/06/17/1023864403482.html http://www.theage.com.au/text/articles/2003/04/25/1050777401309.htm Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Bellamy, Craig. "Post-Logo " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/13-postlogo.php>. APA Style Bellamy, C. (2003, Jun 19). Post-Logo . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/13-postlogo.php>

IntroductionThis paper argues that the industrial contexts of re-imagining, or transforming, literary icons deploy the promotional strategies that are associated with what are usually seen as lesser, or purely commercial, genres. Promotional paratexts (Genette Paratexts; Gray; Hills) reveal transformations of content that position audiences to receive them as creative innovations, superior in many senses to their literary precursors due to the distinctive expertise of creative professionals. This interpretation leverages Matt Hills’ argument that certain kinds of “quality” screened drama are discursively framed as possessing the cultural capital associated with auterist cinema, despite their participation in the marketing logics of media franchising (Johnson). Adaptation theorist Linda Hutcheon proposes that when audiences receive literary adaptations, their pleasure inheres in a mixture of “repetition and difference”, “familiarity and novelty” (114). The difference can take many forms, but may be framed as guaranteed by the “distinction”, or—in Bourdieu’s terms—the cultural capital, of talented individuals and companies. Gerard Genette (Palimpsests) argued that “proximations” or updatings of classic literature involve acknowledging historical shifts in ideological norms as well as aesthetic techniques and tastes. When literary brands are made over using different media, there are economic lures to participation in currently fashionable technologies, as well as current political values. Linda Hutcheon also underlines the pragmatic constraints on the re-imagining of literary brands. “Expensive collaborative art forms” (87) such as films and large stage productions look for safe bets, seeking properties that have the potential to increase the audience for their franchise. Thus the marketplace influences both production and the experience of audiences. While this paper does not attempt a thoroughgoing analysis of audience reception appropriate to a fan studies approach, it borrows concepts from Matt Hills’s theorisation of marketing communication associated with screen “makeovers”. It shows that literary fiction and cinematic texts associated with celebrated authors or auteurist producer-directors share branding discourses characteristic of contemporary consumer culture. Strategies include marketing “reveals” of transformed content (Hills 319). Transformed content is presented not only as demonstrating originality and novelty; these promotional paratexts also perform displays of cultural capital on the part of production teams or of auteurist creatives (321). Case Study 1: Steven Spielberg, The Adventures of Tintin (2011) The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn is itself an adaptation of a literary brand that reimagines earlier transmedia genres. According to Spielberg’s biographer, the Tintin series of bandes dessinée (comics or graphic novels) by Belgian artist Hergé (Georges Remi), has affinities with “boys’ adventure yarns” referencing and paying homage to the “silent filmmaking and the movie serials of the 1930s and ‘40s” (McBride 530). The three comics adapted by Spielberg belong to the more escapist and less “political” phase of Hergé’s career (531). As a fast-paced action movie, building to a dramatic and spectacular closure, the major plot lines of Spielberg’s film centre on Tintin’s search for clues to the secret of a model ship he buys at a street market. Teaming up with an alcoholic sea captain, Tintin solves the mystery while bullying Captain Haddock into regaining his sobriety, his family seat, and his eagerness to partner in further heroic adventures. Spielberg’s industry stature allowed him the autonomy to combine the commercial motivations of contemporary “tentpole” cinema adaptations with aspirations towards personal reputation as an auteurist director. Many of the promotional paratexts associated with the film stress the aesthetic distinction of the director’s practice alongside the blockbuster spectacle of an action film. Reinventing the Literary Brand as FranchiseComic books constitute the “mother lode of franchises” (Balio 26) in a industry that has become increasingly global and risk-adverse (see also Burke). The fan base for comic book movies is substantial and studios pre-promote their investments at events such as the four-day Comic-Con festival held annually in San Diego (Balio 26). Described as “tentpole” films, these adaptations—often of superhero genres—are considered conservative investments by the Hollywood studios because they “constitute media events; […] lend themselves to promotional tie-ins”; are “easy sells in world markets and […] have the ability to spin off sequels to create a franchise” (Balio 26). However, Spielberg chose to adapt a brand little known in the primary market (the US), thus lacking the huge fan-based to which pre-release promotional paratexts might normally be targeted. While this might seem a risky undertaking, it does reflect “changed industry realities” that seek to leverage important international markets (McBride 531). As a producer Spielberg pursued his own strategies to minimise economic risk while allowing him creative choices. This facilitated the pursuit of professional reputation alongside commercial success. The dual release of both War Horse and Tintin exemplify the director-producer’s career practice of bracketing an “entertainment” film with a “more serious work” (McBride 530). The Adventures of Tintin was promoted largely as technical tour de force and spectacle. Conversely War Horse—also adapted from a children’s text—was conceived as a heritage/nostalgia film, marked with the attention to period detail and lyric cinematography of what Matt Hills describes as “aestheticized fiction”. Nevertheless, promotional paratexts stress the discourse of auteurist transformation even in the case of the designedly more commercial Tintin film, as I discuss further below. These pre-release promotions emphasise Spielberg’s “painterly” directorial hand, as well as the professional partnership with Peter Jackson that enabled cutting edge innovation in animation. As McBride explains, the “dual release of the two films in the US was an unusual marketing move” seemingly designed to “showcase Spielberg’s artistic versatility” (McBride 530).Promotional Paratexts and Pre-Recruitment of FansAs Jonathan Gray and Jason Mittell have explained, marketing paratexts predate screen adaptations (Gray; Mittell). As part of the commercial logic of franchise development, selective release of information about a literary brand’s transformation are designed to bring fans of the “original,” or of genre communities such as fantasy or comics audiences, on board with the adaptation. Analysing Steven Moffat’s revelations about the process of adapting and creating a modern TV series from Conan Doyle’s canon (Sherlock), Matt Hills draws attention to the focus on the literary, rather than the many screen reinventions. Moffat’s focus on his childhood passion for the Holmes stories thus grounds the team’s adaptation in a period prior to any “knowledge of rival adaptations […] and any detailed awareness of canon” (326). Spielberg (unlike Jackson) denied any such childhood affective investment, claiming to have been unaware of the similarities between Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and the Tintin series until alerted by a French reviewer of Raiders (McBride 530). In discussing the paradoxical fidelity of his and Jackson’s reimagining of Tintin, Spielberg performed homage to the literary brand while emphasising the aesthetic limitations within the canon of prior adaptations:‘We want Tintin’s adventures to have the reality of a live-action film’, Spielberg explained during preproduction, ‘and yet Peter and I felt that shooting them in a traditional live-action format would simply not honor the distinctive look of the characters and world that Hergé created. Hergé’s characters have been reborn as living beings, expressing emotion and a soul that goes far beyond anything we’ve been able to create with computer-animated characters.’ (McBride 531)In these “reveals”, the discourse positions Spielberg and Jackson as both fans and auteurs, demonstrating affective investment in Hergé’s concepts and world-building while displaying the ingenuity of the partners as cinematic innovators.The Branded Reveal of Transformed ContentAccording to Hills, “quality TV drama” no less than “makeover TV,” is subject to branding practices such as the “reveal” of innovations attributed to creative professionals. Marketing paratexts discursively frame the “professional and creative distinction” of the teams that share and expand the narrative universe of the show’s screen or literary precursors (319–20). Distinction here refers to the cultural capital of the creative teams, as well as to the essential differences between what adaptation theorists refer to as the “hypotext” (source/original) and “hypertext” (adaptation) (Genette Paratexts; Hutcheon). The adaptation’s individualism is fore-grounded, as are the rights of creative teams to inherit, transform, and add richness to the textual universe of the precursor texts. Spielberg denied the “anxiety of influence” (Bloom) linking Tintin and Raiders, though he is reported to have enthusiastically acknowledged the similarities once alerted to them. Nevertheless, Spielberg first optioned Hergé’s series only two years later (1983). Paratexts “reveal” Hergé’s passing of the mantle from author to director, quoting his: “ ‘Yes, I think this guy can make this film. Of course it will not be my Tintin, but it can be a great Tintin’” (McBride 531).Promotional reveals in preproduction show both Spielberg and Jackson performing mutually admiring displays of distinction. Much of this is focused on the choice of motion capture animation, involving attachment of motion sensors to an actor’s body during performance, permitting mapping of realistic motion onto the animated figure. While Spielberg paid tribute to Jackson’s industry pre-eminence in this technical field, the discourse also underlines Spielberg’s own status as auteur. He claimed that Tintin allowed him to feel more like a painter than any prior film. Jackson also underlines the theme of direct imaginative control:The process of operating the small motion-capture virtual camera […] enabled Spielberg to return to the simplicity and fluidity of his 8mm amateur films […] [The small motion-capture camera] enabled Spielberg to put himself literally in the spaces occupied by the actors […] He could walk around with them […] and improvise movements for a film Jackson said they decided should have a handheld feel as much as possible […] All the production was from the imagination right to the computer. (McBride 532)Along with cinematic innovation, pre-release promotions thus rehearse the imaginative pre-eminence of Spielberg’s vision, alongside Jackson and his WETA company’s fantasy credentials, their reputation for meticulous detail, and their innovation in the use of performance capture in live-action features. This rehearsal of professional capital showcases the difference and superiority of The Adventures of Tintin to previous animated adaptations.Case Study 2: Andrew Motion: Silver, Return to Treasure Island (2012)At first glance, literary fiction would seem to be a far-cry from the commercial logics of tentpole cinema. The first work of pure fiction by a former Poet Laureate of Great Britain, updating a children’s classic, Silver: Return to Treasure Island signals itself as an exemplar of quality fiction. Yet the commercial logics of the publishing industry, no less than other media franchises, routinise practices such as author interviews at bookshop visits and festivals, generating paratexts that serve its promotional cycle. Motion’s choice of this classic for adaptation is a step further towards a popular readership than his poetry—or the memoirs, literary criticism, or creative non-fiction (“fabricated” or speculative biographies) (see Mars-Jones)—that constitute his earlier prose output. Treasure Island’s cultural status as boy’s adventure, its exotic setting, its dramatic characters long available in the public domain through earlier screen adaptations, make it a shrewd choice for appropriation in the niche market of literary fiction. Michael Cathcart’s introduction to his ABC Radio National interview with the author hones in on this:Treasure Island is one of those books that you feel as if you’ve read, event if you haven’t. Long John Silver, young Jim Hawkins, Blind Pew, Israel Hands […], these are people who stalk our collective unconscious, and they’re back. (Cathcart)Motion agrees with Cathcart that Treasure Island constitutes literary and common cultural heritage. In both interviews I analyse in the discussion here, Motion states that he “absorbed” the book, “almost by osmosis” as a child, yet returned to it with the mature, critical, evaluative appreciation of the young adult and budding poet (Darragh 27). Stevenson’s original is a “bloody good book”; the implication is that it would not otherwise have met the standards of a literary doyen, possessing a deep knowledge of, and affect for, the canon of English literature. Commercial Logic and Cultural UpdatingSilver is an unauthorised sequel—in Genette’s taxonomy, a “continuation”. However, in promotional interviews on the book and broadcast circuit, Motion claimed a kind of license from the practice of Stevenson, a fellow writer. Stevenson himself notes that a significant portion of the “bar silver” remained on the island, leaving room for a sequel to be generated. In Silver, Jim, the son of Stevenson’s Jim Hawkins, and Natty, daughter of Long John Silver and the “woman of colour”, take off to complete and confront the consequences of their parents’ adventures. In interviews, Motion identifies structural gaps in the precursor text that are discursively positioned to demand completion from, in effect, Stevenson’s literary heir: [Stevenson] was a person who was interested in sequels himself, indeed he wrote a sequel to Kidnapped [which is] proof he was interested in these things. (Cathcart)He does leave lots of doors and windows open at the end of Treasure Island […] perhaps most bewitchingly for me, as the Hispaniola sails away, they leave behind three maroons. So what happened to them? (Darragh)These promotional paratexts drop references to Great Expectations, Heart of Darkness, Lord of the Flies, Wild Sargasso Sea, the plays of Shakespeare and Tom Stoppard, the poetry of Auden and John Clare, and Stevenson’s own “self-conscious” sources: Defoe, Marryat. Discursively, they evidence “double coding” (Hills) as both homage for the canon and the literary “brand” of Stevenson’s popular original, while implicated in the commercial logic of the book industry’s marketing practices.Displays of DistinctionMotion’s interview with Sarah Darragh, for the National Association of Teachers of English, performs the role of man of letters; Motion “professes” and embodies the expertise to speak authoritatively on literature, its criticism, and its teaching. Literature in general, and Silver in particular, he claims, is not “just polemic”, that is “not how it works”, but it does has the ability to recruit readers to moral perspectives, to convey “ new ideas[s] of the self.” Silver’s distinction from Treasure Island lies in its ability to position “deep” readers to develop what is often labelled “theory of mind” (Wolf and Barzillai): “what good literature does, whether you know it or not, is to allow you to be someone else for a bit,” giving us “imaginative projection into another person’s experience” (Darragh 29). A discourse of difference and superiority is also associated with the transformed “brand.” Motion is emphatic that Silver is not a children’s book—“I wouldn’t know how to do that” (Darragh 28)—a “lesser” genre in canonical hierarchies. It is a writerly and morally purposeful fiction, “haunted” by greats of the canon and grounded in expertise in philosophical and literary heritage. In addition, he stresses the embedded seriousness of his reinvention: it is “about how to be a modern person and about greed and imperialism” (Darragh 27), as well as a deliberatively transformed artefact:The road to literary damnation is […] paved with bad sequels and prequels, and the reason that they fail […] is that they take the original on at its own game too precisely […] so I thought, casting my mind around those that work [such as] Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead […] or Jean Rhys’ wonderful novel Wide Sargasso Sea which is about the first Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre […] that if I took a big step away from the original book I would solve this problem of competing with something I was likely to lose in competition with and to create something that was a sort of homage […] towards it, but that stood at a significant distance from it […]. (Cathcart) Motion thus rehearses homage and humility, while implicitly defending the transformative imagination of his “sequel” against the practice of lesser, failed, clonings.Motion’s narrative expansion of Stevenson’s fictional universe is an example of “overwriting continuity” established by his predecessor, and thus allowing him to make “meaningful claims to creative and professional distinction” while demonstrating his own “creative viewpoint” (Hills 320). The novel boldly recapitulates incidental details, settings, and dramatic embedded character-narrations from Treasure Island. Distinctively, though, its opening sequence is a paean to romantic sensibility in the tradition of Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1799–1850).The Branded Reveal of Transformed ContentSilver’s paratexts discursively construct its transformation and, by implication, improvement, from Stevenson’s original. Motion reveals the sequel’s change of zeitgeist, its ideological complexity and proximity to contemporary environmental and postcolonial values. These are represented through the superior perspective of romanticism and the scientific lens on the natural world:Treasure Island is a pre-Enlightenment story, it is pre-French Revolution, it’s the bad old world […] where people have a different ideas of democracy […] Also […] Jim is beginning to be aware of nature in a new way […] [The romantic poet, John Clare] was publishing in the 1820s but a child in the early 1800s, I rather had him in mind for Jim as somebody who was seeing the world in the same sort of way […] paying attention to the little things in nature, and feeling a sort of kinship with the natural world that we of course want to put an environmental spin on these days, but [at] the beginning of the 1800s was a new and important thing, a romantic preoccupation. (Cathcart)Motion’s allusion to Wild Sargasso Sea discursively appropriates Rhys’s feminist and postcolonial reimagination of Rochester’s creole wife, to validate his portrayal of Long John Silver’s wife, the “woman of colour.” As Christian Moraru has shown, this rewriting of race is part of a book industry trend in contemporary American adaptations of nineteenth-century texts. Interviews position readers of Silver to receive the novel in terms of increased moral complexity, sharing its awareness of the evils of slavery and violence silenced in prior adaptations.Two streams of influence [come] out of Treasure Island […] one is Pirates of the Caribbean and all that jolly jape type stuff, pirates who are essentially comic [or pantomime] characters […] And the other stream, which is the other face of Long John Silver in the original is a real menace […] What we are talking about is Somalia. Piracy is essentially a profoundly serious and repellent thing […]. (Cathcart)Motion’s transformation of Treasure Island, thus, improves on Stevenson by taking some of the menace that is “latent in the original”, yet downplayed by the genre reinvented as “jolly jape” or “gorefest.” In contrast, Silver is “a book about serious things” (Cathcart), about “greed and imperialism” and “how to be a modern person,” ideologically reconstructed as “philosophical history” by a consummate man of letters (Darragh).ConclusionWhen iconic literary brands are reimagined across media, genres and modes, creative professionals frequently need to balance various affective and commercial investments in the precursor text or property. Updatings of classic texts require interpretation and the negotiation of subtle changes in values that have occurred since the creation of the “original.” Producers in risk-averse industries such as screen and publishing media practice a certain pragmatism to ensure that fans’ nostalgia for a popular brand is not too violently scandalised, while taking care to reproduce currently popular technologies and generic conventions in the interest of maximising audience. As my analysis shows, promotional circuits associated with “quality” fiction and cinema mirror the commercial logics associated with less valorised genres. Promotional paratexts reveal transformations of content that position audiences to receive them as creative innovations, superior in many senses to their literary precursors due to the distinctive expertise of creative professionals. Paying lip-service the sophisticated reading practices of contemporary fans of both cinema and literary fiction, their discourse shows the conflicting impulses to homage, critique, originality, and recruitment of audiences.ReferencesBalio, Tino. Hollywood in the New Millennium. London: Palgrave Macmillan/British Film Institute, 2013.Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997.Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987. Burke, Liam. The Comic Book Film Adaptation: Exploring Modern Hollywood's Leading Genre. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2015. Cathcart, Michael (Interviewer). Andrew Motion's Silver: Return to Treasure Island. 2013. Transcript of Radio Interview. Prod. Kate Evans. 26 Jan. 2013. 10 Apr. 2013 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/booksplus/silver/4293244#transcript›.Darragh, Sarah. "In Conversation with Andrew Motion." 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Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui pengaruh Financial Distress memediasi Good Corporate Governance dan Return saham. Penilaian financial distress menggunakan proksi Altman Z-Score untuk EMS (Emerging Market) yang dirasakan sesuai dengan kondisi pasar modal di Indonesia. Model analisis yang digunakan adalah regresi berganda dan hasil yang ditemukan adanya pengaruh financial distress memediasi kedua variabel penelitian GCG dan return saham. Dari keseluruhan emiten yang tercatat dalam SWA (per 1 November 2018), ditemukan sejumlah 12 emiten yang dapat dijadikan sampel dalam penelitian karena konsistensi keikutsertaan dalam penilaian GCG oleh IICG. 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This article proposes that the growing popularity of reality television in the southernmost state of India, Kerala – disseminated locally and throughout the Indian diaspora – is not the product of an innocuous nostalgia for a fast-disappearing regional identity but rather a spectacular example of an emergent ideology that displaces cultural memory, collective identity, and secular nationalism with new, globalised forms of public sentiment. Further, it is arguable that this g/local media culture also displaces hard-won secular feminist constructions of gender and the contemporary modern “Indian woman.” Shows like Idea Star Singer (hereafter ISS) (Malayalam [the language spoken in Kerala] television’s most popular reality television series), based closely on American Idol, is broadcast worldwide to dozens of nations including the US, the UK, China, Russia, Sri Lanka, and several nations in the Middle East and the discussion that follows attempts both to account for this g/local phenomenon and to problematise it. ISS concentrates on staging the diversity and talent of Malayalee youth and, in particular, their ability to sing ‘pitch-perfect’, by inviting them to perform the vast catalogue of traditional Malayalam songs. However, inasmuch as it is aimed at both a regional and diasporic audience, ISS also allows for a diversity of singing styles displayed through the inclusion of a variety of other songs: some sung in Tamil, some Hindi, and some even English. This leads us to ask a number of questions: in what ways are performers who subscribe to regional or global models of televisual style rewarded or punished? In what ways are performers who exemplify differences in terms of gender, sexuality, religion, class, or ability punished? Further, it is arguable that this show—packaged as the “must-see” spectacle for the Indian diaspora—re-imagines a traditional past and translates it (under the rubric of “reality” television) into a vulgar commodification of both “classical” and “folk” India: an India excised of radical reform, feminists, activists, and any voices of multiplicity clamouring for change. Indeed, it is my contention that, although such shows claim to promote women’s liberation by encouraging women to realise their talents and ambitions, the commodification of the “stars” as televisual celebrities points rather to an anti-feminist imperial agenda of control and domination. Normalising Art: Presenting the Juridical as Natural Following Foucault, we can, indeed, read ISS as an apparatus of “normalisation.” While ISS purports to be “about” music, celebration, and art—an encouragement of art for art’s sake—it nevertheless advocates the practice of teaching as critiqued by Foucault: “the acquisition and knowledge by the very practice of the pedagogical activity and a reciprocal, hierarchised observation” (176), so that self-surveillance is built into the process. What appears on the screen is, in effect, the presentation of a juridically governed body as natural: the capitalist production of art through intense practice, performance, and corrective measures that valorise discipline and, at the end, produce ‘good’ and ‘bad’ subjects. The Foucauldian isomorphism of punishment with obligation, exercise with repetition, and enactment of the law is magnified in the traditional practice of music, especially Carnatic, or the occasional Hindustani refrain that separates those who come out of years of training in the Gury–Shishya mode (teacher–student mode, primarily Hindu and privileged) from those who do not (Muslims, working-class, and perhaps disabled students). In the context of a reality television show sponsored by Idea Cellular Ltd (a phone company with global outposts), the systems of discipline are strictly in line with the capitalist economy. Since this show depends upon the vast back-catalogue of film songs sung by playback singers from the era of big studio film-making, it may be seen to advocate a mimetic rigidity that ossifies artistic production, rather than offering encouragement to a new generation of artists who might wish to take the songs and make them their own. ISS, indeed, compares and differentiates the participants’ talents through an “opaque” system of evaluations which the show presents as transparent, merit-based and “fair”: as Foucault observes, “the perpetual penalty that traverses all points and supervises every instant in the disciplinary institutions compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes. In short, it normalizes” (183). On ISS, this evaluation process (a panel of judges who are renowned singers and composers, along with a rotating guest star, such as an actor) may be seen as a scopophilic institution where training and knowledge are brought together, transforming “the economy of visibility into the exercise of power” (187). The contestants, largely insignificant as individuals but seen together, at times, upon the stage, dancing and singing and performing practised routines, represent a socius constituting the body politic. The judges, enthroned on prominent and lush seats above the young contestants, the studio audience and, in effect, the show’s televised transnational audience, deliver judgements that “normalise” these artists into submissive subjectivity. In fact, despite the incoherence of the average judgement, audiences are so engrossed in the narrative of “marks” (a clear vestige of the education and civilising mission of the colonial subject under British rule) that, even in the glamorous setting of vibrating music, artificial lights, and corporate capital, Indians can still be found disciplining themselves according to the values of the West. Enacting Keraleeyatham for Malayalee Diaspora Ritty Lukose’s study on youth and gender in Kerala frames identity formations under colonialism, nationalism, and capitalism as she teases out ideas of resistance and agency by addressing the complex mediations of consumption or consumptive practices. Lukose reads “consumer culture as a complex site of female participation and constraint, enjoyment and objectification” (917), and finds the young, westernised female as a particular site of consumer agency. According to this theory, the performers on ISS and the show’s MC, Renjini Haridas, embody this body politic. The young performers all dress in the garb of “authentic identity”, sporting saris, pawaadu-blouse, mundum-neertha, salwaar-kameez, lehenga-choli, skirts, pants, and so on. This sartorial diversity is deeply gendered and discursively rich; the men have one of two options: kurta-mundu or some such variation and the pant–shirt combination. The women, especially Renjini (educated at St Theresa’s College in Kochi and former winner of Ms Kerala beauty contest) evoke the MTV DJs of the mid-1990s and affect a pidgin-Malayalam spliced with English: Renjini’s cool “touching” of the contestants and airy gestures remove her from the regional masses; and yet, for Onam (festival of Kerala), she dresses in the traditional cream and gold sari; for Id (high holy day for Muslims), she dresses in some glittery salwaar-kameez with a wrap on her head; and for Christmas, she wears a long dress. This is clearly meant to show her ability to embody different socio-religious spheres simultaneously. Yet, both she and all the young female contestants speak proudly about their authentic Kerala identity. Ritty Lukose spells this out as “Keraleeyatham.” In the vein of beauty pageants, and the first-world practice of indoctrinating all bodies into one model of beauty, the youngsters engage in exuberant performances yet, once their act is over, revert back to the coy, submissive docility that is the face of the student in the traditional educational apparatus. Both left-wing feminists and BJP activists write their ballads on the surface of women’s bodies; however, in enacting the chethu or, to be more accurate, “ash-push” (colloquialism akin to “hip”) lifestyle advocated by the show (interrupted at least half a dozen times by lengthy sequences of commercials for jewellery, clothing, toilet cleaners, nutritious chocolate bars, hair oil, and home products), the participants in this show become the unwitting sites of a large number of competing ideologies. Lukose observes the remarkable development from the peasant labor-centered Kerala of the 1970s to today’s simulacrum: “Keraleeyatham.” When discussing the beauty contests staged in Kerala in the 1990s, she discovers (through analysis of the dress and Sanskrit-centred questions) that: “Miss Kerala must be a naden pennu [a girl of the native/rural land] in her dress, comportment, and knowledge. Written onto the female bodies of a proliferation of Miss Keralas, the nadu, locality itself, becomes transportable and transposable” (929). Lukose observes that these women have room to enact their passions and artistry only within the metadiegetic space of the “song and dance” spectacle; once they leave it, they return to a modest, Kerala-gendered space in which the young female performers are quiet to the point of inarticulate, stuttering silence (930). However, while Lukose’s term, Keraleeyatham, is useful as a sociological compass, I contend that it has even more complex connotations. Its ethos of “Nair-ism” (Nayar was the dominant caste identity in Kerala), which could have been a site of resistance and identity formation, instead becomes a site of nationalist, regional linguistic supremacy arising out of Hindu imaginary. Second, this ideology could not have been developed in the era of pre-globalised state-run television but now, in the wake of globalisation and satellite television, we see this spectacle of “discipline and punish” enacted on the world stage. Thus, although I do see a possibility for a more positive Keraleeyatham that is organic, inclusive, and radical, for the moment we have a hegemonic, exclusive, and hierarchical statist approach to regional identity that needs to be re-evaluated. Articulating the Authentic via the Simulacrum Welcome to the Malayalee matrix. Jean Baudrillard’s simulacrum is our entry point into visualising the code of reality television. In a state noted for its distinctly left-leaning politics and Communist Party history which underwent radical reversal in the 1990s, the political front in Kerala is still dominated by the LDF (Left Democratic Front), and resistance to the state is an institutionalised and satirised daily event, as marked by the marchers who gather and stop traffic at Palayam in the capital city daily at noon. Issues of poverty and corporate disenfranchisement plague the farming and fishing communities while people suffer transportation tragedies, failures of road development and ferry upkeep on a daily basis. Writers and activists rail against imminent aerial bombing of Maoists insurgent groups, reading in such statist violence repression of the Adivasi (indigenous) peoples scattered across many states of eastern and southern India. Alongside energy and ration supply issues, politics light up the average Keralaite, and yet the most popular “reality” television show reflects none of it. Other than paying faux multicultural tribute to all the festivals that come and go (such as Id, Diwaali, Christmas, and Kerala Piravi [Kerala Day on 1 November]), mainly through Renjini’s dress and chatter, ISS does all it can to remove itself from the turmoil of the everyday. Much in the same way that Bollywood cinema has allowed the masses to escape the oppressions of “the everyday,” reality television promises speculative pleasure produced on the backs of young performers who do not even have to be paid for their labour. Unlike Malayalam cinema’s penchant for hard-hitting politics and narratives of unaccounted for, everyday lives in neo-realist style, today’s reality television—with its excessive sound and light effects, glittering stages and bejewelled participants, repeat zooms, frontal shots, and artificial enhancements—exploits the paradox of hyper-authenticity (Rose and Wood 295). In her useful account of America’s top reality show, American Idol, Katherine Meizel investigates the fascination with the show’s winners and the losers, and the drama of an American “ideal” of diligence and ambition that is seen to be at the heart of the show. She writes, “It is about selling the Dream—regardless of whether it results in success or failure—and about the enactment of ideology that hovers at the edges of any discourse about American morality. It is the potential of great ambition, rather than of great talent, that drives these hopefuls and inspires their fans” (486). In enacting the global via the site of the local (Malayalam and Tamil songs primarily), ISS assumes the mantle of Americanism through the plain-spoken, direct commentaries of the singers who, like their US counterparts, routinely tell us how all of it has changed their lives. In other words, this retrospective meta-narrative becomes more important than the show itself. True to Baudrillard’s theory, ISS blurs the line between actual need and the “need” fabricated by the media and multinational corporations like Idea Cellular and Confident Group (which builds luxury homes, primarily for the new bourgeoisie and nostalgic “returnees” from the diaspora). The “New Kerala” is marked, for the locals, by extravagant (mostly unoccupied) constructions of photogenic homes in garish colours, located in the middle of chaos: the traditional nattumparathu (countryside) wooden homes, and traffic congestion. The homes, promised at the end of these shows, have a “value” based on the hyper-real economy of the show rather than an actual utility value. Yet those who move from the “old” world to the “new” do not always fare well. In local papers, the young artists are often criticised for their new-found haughtiness and disinclination to visit ill relatives in hospital: a veritable sin in a culture that places the nadu and kin above all narratives of progress. In other words, nothing quite adds up: the language and ideologies of the show, espoused most succinctly by its inarticulate host, is a language that obscures its distance from reality. ISS maps onto its audience the emblematic difference between “citizen” and “population”. Through the chaotic, state-sanctioned paralegal devices that allow the slum-dwellers and other property-less people to dwell in the cities, the voices of the labourers (such as the unions) have been silenced. It is a nation ever more geographically divided between the middle-classes which retreat into their gated neighbourhoods, and the shanty-town denizens who are represented by the rising class of religio-fundamentalist leaders. While the poor vote in the Hindu hegemony, the middle classes text in their votes to reality shows like ISS. Partha Chatterjee speaks of the “new segregated and exclusive spaces for the managerial and technocratic elite” (143) which is obsessed by media images, international travel, suburbanisation, and high technology. I wish to add to this list the artificially created community of ISS performers and stars; these are, indeed, the virtual and global extension of Chatterjee’s exclusive, elite communities, decrying the new bourgeois order of Indian urbanity, repackaged as Malayalee, moneyed, and Nayar. Meanwhile, the Hindu Right flexes its muscle under the show’s glittery surface: neither menacing nor fundamentalist, it is now “hip” to be Hindu. Thus while, on the surface, ISS operates according to the cliché, musicinu mathamilla (“music has no religion”), I would contend that it perpetuates a colonising space of Hindu-nationalist hegemony which standardises music appreciation, flattens music performance into an “art” developed solely to serve commercial cinema, and produces a dialectic of Keraleeyatham that erases the multiplicities of its “real.” This ideology, meanwhile, colonises from within. The public performance plays out in the private sphere where the show is consumed; at the same time, the private is inserted into the public with SMS calls that ultimately help seal the juridicality of the show and give the impression of “democracy.” Like the many networks that bring the sentiments of melody and melancholy to our dinner table, I would like to offer you this alternative account of ISS as part of a bid for a more vociferous, and critical, engagement with reality television and its modes of production. Somehow we need to find a way to savour, once again, the non-mimetic aspects of art and to salvage our darkness from the glitter of the “normalising” popular media. References Baudrillard, Jean. The Mirror of Production. Trans. Mark Poster. New York: Telos, 1975. ———. Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster. California: Stanford UP, 1988. Chatterjee, Partha. The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1995. Lukose, Ritty. “Consuming Globalization: Youth and Gender in Kerala, India.” Journal of Social History 38.4 (Summer 2005): 915-35. Meizel, Katherine. “Making the Dream a Reality (Show): The Celebration of Failure in American Idol.” Popular Music and Society 32.4 (Oct. 2009): 475-88. Rose, Randall L., and Stacy L. Wood. “Paradox and the Consumption of Authenticity through Reality Television.” Journal of Consumer Research 32 (Sep. 2005): 284-96.

In this paper we explore the rise of anti-gambling apps in the context of the massive expansion of gambling in new spheres of life (online and offline) and an acceleration in strategies of anticipatory and individualised management of harm caused by gambling. These apps, and the techniques and forms of labour they demand, are examples of and a mechanism through which a mode of governance premised on ‘self-care’ and ‘self-control’ is articulated and put into practice. To support this argument, we explore two government initiatives in the Australian context. Quit Pokies, a mobile app project between the Moreland City Council, North East Primary Care Partnership and the Victorian Local Governance Association, is an example of an emerging service paradigm of ‘self-care’ that uses online and mobile platforms with geo-location to deliver real time health and support interventions. A similar mobile app, Gambling Terminator, was launched by the NSW government in late 2012. Both apps work on the premise that interrupting a gaming session through a trigger, described by Quit Pokies’ creator as a “tap on the shoulder” provides gamblers the opportunity to take a reflexive stance and cut short their gambling practice in the course of play. We critically examine these apps as self-disciplining techniques of contemporary neo-liberalism directed towards anticipating and reducing the personal harm and social risk associated with gambling. We analyse the material and discursive elements, and new forms of user labour, through which this consumable media is framed and assembled. We argue that understanding the role of these apps, and mobile media more generally, in generating new techniques and technologies of the self, is important for identifying emerging modes of governance and their implications at a time when gambling is going through an immense period of cultural normalisation in online and offline environments. The Australian context is particularly germane for the way gambling permeates everyday spaces of sociality and leisure, and the potential of gambling interventions to interrupt and re-configure these spaces and institute a new kind of subject-state relation. Gambling in Australia Though a global phenomenon, the growth and expansion of gambling manifests distinctly in Australia because of its long cultural and historical attachment to games of chance. Australians are among the biggest betters and losers in the world (Ziolkowski), mainly on Electronic Gaming Machines (EGM) or pokies. As of 2013, according to The World Count of Gaming Machine (Ziolkowski), there were 198,150 EGMs in the country, of which 197,274 were slot machines, with the rest being electronic table games of roulette, blackjack and poker. There are 118 persons per machine in Australia. New South Wales is the jurisdiction with most EGMs (95,799), followed by Queensland (46,680) and Victoria (28,758) (Ziolkowski). Gambling is significant in Australian cultural history and average Australian households spend at least some money on different forms of gambling, from pokies to scratch cards, every year (Worthington et al.). In 1985, long-time gambling researcher Geoffrey Caldwell stated thatAustralians seem to take a pride in the belief that we are a nation of gamblers. Thus we do not appear to be ashamed of our gambling instincts, habits and practices. Gambling is regarded by most Australians as a normal, everyday practice in contrast to the view that gambling is a sinful activity which weakens the moral fibre of the individual and the community. (Caldwell 18) The omnipresence of gambling opportunities in most Australian states has been further facilitated by the availability of online and mobile gambling and gambling-like spaces. Social casino apps, for instance, are widely popular in Australia. The slots social casino app Slotomania was the most downloaded product in the iTunes store in 2012 (Metherell). In response to the high rate of different forms of gambling in Australia, a range of disparate interest groups have identified the expansion of gambling as a concerning trend. Health researchers have pointed out that online gamblers have a higher risk of experiencing problems with gambling (at 30%) compared to 15% in offline bettors (Hastings). The incidence of gambling problems is also disproportionately high in specific vulnerable demographics, including university students (Cervini), young adults prone to substance abuse problems (Hayatbakhsh et al.), migrants (Tanasornnarong et al.; Scull & Woolcock; Ohtsuka & Ohtsuka), pensioners (Hing & Breen), female players (Lee), Aboriginal communities (Young et al.; McMillen & Donnelly) and individuals experiencing homelessness (Holsworth et al.). While there is general recognition of the personal and public health impacts of gambling in Australia, there is a contradiction in the approach to gambling at a governance level. On one hand, its expansion is promoted and even encouraged by the federal and state governments, as gambling is an enormous source of revenue, as evidenced, for example, by the construction of the new Crown casino in Barangaroo in Sydney (Markham & Young). Campaigns trying to limit the use of poker machines, which are associated with concerns over problem gambling and addiction, are deemed by the gambling lobby as un-Australian. Paradoxically, efforts to restrict gambling or control gambling winnings have also been described as un-Australian, such as in the Australian Taxation Office’s campaign against MONA’s founder, David Walsh, whose immense art collection was acquired with the funds from a gambling scheme (Global Mail). On the other hand, people experiencing problems with gambling are often categorised as addicts and the ultimate blame (and responsibility) is attributed to the individual. In Australia, attitudes towards people who are arguably addicted to gambling are different than those towards individuals afflicted by alcohol or drug abuse (Jean). While “Australians tend to be sympathetic towards people with alcohol and other drug addictions who seek help,” unless it is seen as one of the more socially acceptable forms of occasional, controlled gambling (such as sports betting, gambling on the Melbourne Cup or celebrating ANZAC Day with Two-Up), gambling is framed as an individual “problem” and “moral failing” (Jean). The expansion of gambling is the backdrop to another development in health care and public health discourse, which have for some time now been devoted to the ideal of what Lupton has called the “digitally engaged patient” (Lupton). Technologies are central to the delivery of this model of health service provision that puts the patient at the centre of, and responsible for, their own health and medical care. Lupton has pointed out how this discourse, while appearing new, is in fact the latest version of the 1970s emphasis on the ‘patient as consumer’, an idea given an extra injection by the massive development and availability of digital and interactive web-based and mobile platforms, many of these directed towards the provision of health and health-related information and services. What this means for patients is that, rather than relying solely on professional medical expertise and care, the patient is encouraged to take on some of this medical/health work to conduct practices of ‘self-care’ (Lupton). The Discourse of ‘Self-Management’ and ‘Self-Care’ The model of ‘self-care’ and ‘self-management’ by ‘empowering’ digital technology has now become a dominant discourse within health and medicine, and is increasingly deployed across a range of related sectors such as welfare services. In recent research conducted on homelessness and mobile media, for example, government department staff involved in the reform of welfare services referred to ‘self-management’ as the new service paradigm that underpins their digital reform strategy. Echoing ideas and language similar to the “digitally engaged patient”, customers of Centrelink, Medicare and other ‘human services’ are being encouraged (through planned strategic initiatives aimed at shifting targeted customer groups online) to transact with government services digitally and manage their own personal profiles and health information. One departmental staff member described this in terms of an “opportunity cost”, the savings in time otherwise spent standing in long queues in service centres (Humphry). Rather than view these examples as isolated incidents taking place within or across sectors or disciplines, these are better understood as features of an emerging ‘discursive formation’ , a term Foucault used to describe the way in which particular institutions and/or the state establish a regime of truth, or an accepted social reality and which gives definition to a new historical episteme and subject: in this case that of the self-disciplined and “digitally engaged medical/health patient”. As Foucault explained, once this subject has become fully integrated into and across the social field, it is no longer easy to excavate, since it lies below the surface of articulation and is held together through everyday actions, habits and institutional routines and techniques that appear to be universal, necessary and/normal. The way in which this citizen subject becomes a universal model and norm, however, is not a straightforward or linear story and since we are in the midst of its rise, is not a story with a foretold conclusion. Nevertheless, across a range of different fields of governance: medicine; health and welfare, we can see signs of this emerging figure of the self-caring “digitally engaged patient” constituted from a range of different techniques and practices of self-governance. In Australia, this figure is at the centre of a concerted strategy of service digitisation involving a number of cross sector initiatives such as Australia’s National EHealth Strategy (2008), the National Digital Economy Strategy (2011) and the Australian Public Service Mobile Roadmap (2013). This figure of the self-caring “digitally engaged” patient, aligns well and is entirely compatible with neo-liberal formulations of the individual and the reduced role of the state as a provider of welfare and care. Berry refers to Foucault’s definition of neoliberalism as outlined in his lectures to the College de France as a “particular form of post-welfare state politics in which the state essentially outsources the responsibility of the ‘well-being' of the population” (65). In the case of gambling, the neoliberal defined state enables the wedding of two seemingly contradictory stances: promoting gambling as a major source of revenue and capitalisation on the one hand, and identifying and treating gambling addiction as an individual pursuit and potential risk on the other. Risk avoidance strategies are focused on particular groups of people who are targeted for self-treatment to avoid the harm of gambling addiction, which is similarly framed as individual rather than socially and systematically produced. What unites and makes possible this alignment of neoliberalism and the new “digitally engaged subject/patient” is first and foremost, the construction of a subject in a chronic state of ill health. This figure is positioned as terminal from the start. They are ‘sick’, a ‘patient’, an ‘addict’: in need of immediate and continuous treatment. Secondly, this neoliberal patient/addict is enabled (we could even go so far as to say ‘empowered’) by digital technology, especially smartphones and the apps available through these devices in the form of a myriad of applications for intervening and treating ones afflictions. These apps range fromself-tracking programs such as mood regulators through to social media interventions. Anti-Pokie Apps and the Neoliberal Gambler We now turn to two examples which illustrate this alignment between neoliberalism and the new “digitally engaged subject/patient” in relation to gambling. Anti-gambling apps function to both replace or ‘take the place’ of institutions and individuals actively involved in the treatment of problem gambling and re-engineer this service through the logics of ‘self-care’ and ‘self-management’. Here, we depart somewhat from Foucault’s model of disciplinary power summed up in the institution (with the prison exemplifying this disciplinary logic) and move towards Deleuze’s understanding of power as exerted by the State not through enclosures but through diffuse and rhizomatic information flows and technologies (Deleuze). At the same time, we retain Foucault’s attention to the role and agency of the user in this power-dynamic, identifiable in the technics of self-regulation and in his ideas on governmentality. We now turn to analyse these apps more closely, and explore the way in which these articulate and perform these disciplinary logics. The app Quit Pokies was a joint venture of the North East Primary Care Partnership, the Victorian Local Governance Association and the Moreland City Council, launched in early 2014. The idea of the rational, self-reflexive and agentic user is evident in the description of the app by app developer Susan Rennie who described it this way: What they need is for someone to tap them on the shoulder and tell them to get out of there… I thought the phone could be that tap on the shoulder. The “tap on the shoulder” feature uses geolocation and works by emitting a sound alert when the user enters a gaming venue. It also provides information about each user’s losses at that venue. This “tap on the shoulder” is both an alert and a reprimand from past gambling sessions. Through the Responsible Gambling Fund, the NSW government also launched an anti-pokie app in 2013, Gambling Terminator, including a similar feature. The app runs on Apple and Android smartphone platforms, and when a person is inside a gambling venue in New South Wales it: sends reminder messages that interrupt gaming-machine play and gives you a chance to re-think your choices. It also provides instant access to live phone and online counselling services which operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week. (Google Play Store) Yet an approach that tries to prevent harm by anticipating the harm that will come from gambling at the point of entering a venue, also eliminates the chance of potential negotiations and encounters a user might have during a visit to the pub and how this experience will unfold. It reduces the “tap on the shoulder”, which may involve a far wider set of interactions and affects, to a software operation and it frames the pub or the club (which under some conditions functions as hubs for socialization and community building) as dangerous places that should be avoided. This has the potential to lead to further stigmatisation of gamblers, their isolation and their exclusion from everyday spaces. Moreland Mayor, Councillor Tapinos captures the implicit framing of self-care as a private act in his explanation of the app as a method for problem gamblers to avoid being stigmatised by, for example, publicly attending group meetings. Yet, curiously, the app has the potential to create a new kind of public stigmatisation through potentially drawing other peoples’ attention to users’ gambling play (as the alarm is triggered) generating embarrassment and humiliation at being “caught out” in an act framed as aberrant and literally, “alarming”. Both Quit Pokies and Gambling Terminator require their users to perform ‘acts’ of physical and affective labour aimed at behaviour change and developing the skills of self-control. After downloading Quit Pokies on the iPhone and launching the app, the user is presented an initial request: “Before you set up this app. please write a list of the pokies venues that you regularly use because the app will ask you to identify these venues so it can send you alerts if you spend time in these locations. It will also use your set up location to identify other venues you might use so we recommend that you set up the App in the location where you spend most time. Congratulation on choosing Quit Pokies.”Self-performed processes include installation, setting up, updating the app software, programming in gambling venues to be detected by the smartphone’s inbuilt GPS, monitoring and responding to the program’s alerts and engaging in alternate “legitimate” forms of leisure such as going to the movies or the library, having coffee with a friend or browsing Facebook. These self-performed labours can be understood as ‘technologies of the self’, a term used by Foucault to describe the way in which social members are obliged to regulate and police their ‘selves’ through a range of different techniques. While Foucault traces the origins of ‘technologies of the self’ to the Greco-Roman texts with their emphasis on “care of oneself” as one of the duties of citizenry, he notes the shift to “self-knowledge” under Christianity around the 8th century, where it became bound up in ideals of self-renunciation and truth. Quit Pokies and Gambling Terminator may signal a recuperation of the ideal of self-care, over confession and disclosure. These apps institute a set of bodily activities and obligations directed to the user’s health and wellbeing, aided through activities of self-examination such as charting your recovery through a Recovery Diary and implementing a number of suggested “Strategies for Change” such as “writing a list” and “learning about ways to manage your money better”. Writing is central to the acts of self-examination. As Jeremy Prangnell, gambling counsellor from Mission Australia for Wollongong and Shellharbour regions explained the app is “like an electronic diary, which is a really common tool for people who are trying to change their behaviour” (Thompson). The labours required by users are also implicated in the functionality and performance of the platform itself suggesting the way in which ‘technologies of the self’ simultaneously function as a form of platform work: user labour that supports and sustains the operation of digital systems and is central to the performance and continuation of digital capitalism in general (Humphry, Demanding Media). In addition to the acts of labour performed on the self and platform, bodies are themselves potentially mobilised (and put into new circuits of consumption and production), as a result of triggers to nudge users away from gambling venues, towards a range of other cultural practices in alternative social spaces considered to be more legitimate.Conclusion Whether or not these technological interventions are effective or successful is yet to be tested. Indeed, the lack of recent activity in the community forums and preponderance of issues reported on installation and use suggests otherwise, pointing to a need for more empirical research into these developments. Regardless, what we’ve tried to identify is the way in which apps such as these embody a new kind of subject-state relation that emphasises self-control of gambling harm and hastens the divestment of institutional and social responsibility at a time when gambling is going through an immense period of expansion in many respects backed by and sanctioned by the state. Patterns of smartphone take up in the mainstream population and the rise of the so called ‘mobile only population’ (ACMA) provide support for this new subject and service paradigm and are often cited as the rationale for digital service reform (APSMR). Media convergence feeds into these dynamics: service delivery becomes the new frontier for the merging of previously separate media distribution systems (Dwyer). Letters, customer service centres, face-to-face meetings and web sites, are combined and in some instances replaced, with online and mobile media platforms, accessible from multiple and mobile devices. These changes are not, however, simply the migration of services to a digital medium with little effective change to the service itself. Health and medical services are re-invented through their technological re-assemblage, bringing into play new meanings, practices and negotiations among the state, industry and neoliberal subjects (in the case of problem gambling apps, a new subjectivity, the ‘neoliberal addict’). These new assemblages are as much about bringing forth a new kind of subject and mode of governance, as they are a solution to problem gambling. This figure of the self-treating “gambler addict” can be seen to be a template for, and prototype of, a more generalised and universalised self-governing citizen: one that no longer needs or makes demands on the state but who can help themselves and manage their own harm. Paradoxically, there is the potential for new risks and harms to the very same users that accompanies this shift: their outright exclusion as a result of deprivation from basic and assumed digital access and literacy, the further stigmatisation of gamblers, the elimination of opportunities for proximal support and their exclusion from everyday spaces. References Albarrán-Torres, César. “Gambling-Machines and the Automation of Desire.” Platform: Journal of Media and Communication 5.1 (2013). Australian Communications and Media Authority. “Australians Cut the Cord.” Research Snapshots. Sydney: ACMA (2013) Berry, David. Critical Theory and the Digital. Broadway, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014 Berry, David. Stunlaw: A Critical Review of Politics, Arts and Technology. 2012. ‹http://stunlaw.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/code-foucault-and-neoliberal.html›. Caldwell, G. “Some Historical and Sociological Characteristics of Australian Gambling.” Gambling in Australia. Eds. G. Caldwell, B. Haig, M. Dickerson, and L. Sylan. Sydney: Croom Helm Australia, 1985. 18-27. Cervini, E. “High Stakes for Gambling Students.” The Age 8 Nov. 2013. ‹http://www.theage.com.au/national/education/high-stakes-for-gambling-students-20131108-2x5cl.html›. Deleuze, Gilles. "Postscript on the Societies of Control." October (1992): 3-7. Foucault, Michel. “Technologies of the Self.” Eds. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988 Hastings, E. “Online Gamblers More at Risk of Addiction.” Herald Sun 13 Oct. 2013. ‹http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/online-gamblers-more-at-risk-of-addiction/story-fni0fiyv-1226739184629#!›.Hayatbakhsh, Mohammad R., et al. "Young Adults' Gambling and Its Association with Mental Health and Substance Use Problems." Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health 36.2 (2012): 160-166. Hing, Nerilee, and Helen Breen. "A Profile of Gaming Machine Players in Clubs in Sydney, Australia." Journal of Gambling Studies 18.2 (2002): 185-205. Holdsworth, Louise, Margaret Tiyce, and Nerilee Hing. "Exploring the Relationship between Problem Gambling and Homelessness: Becoming and Being Homeless." Gambling Research 23.2 (2012): 39. Humphry, Justine. “Demanding Media: Platform Work and the Shaping of Work and Play.” Scan: Journal of Media Arts Culture, 10.2 (2013): 1-13. Humphry, Justine. “Homeless and Connected: Mobile Phones and the Internet in the Lives of Homeless Australians.” Australian Communications Consumer Action Network. Sep. 2014. ‹https://www.accan.org.au/grants/completed-grants/619-homeless-and-connected›.Lee, Timothy Jeonglyeol. "Distinctive Features of the Australian Gambling Industry and Problems Faced by Australian Women Gamblers." Tourism Analysis 14.6 (2009): 867-876. Lupton, D. “The Digitally Engaged Patient: Self-Monitoring and Self-Care in the Digital Health Era.” Social Theory & Health 11.3 (2013): 256-70. Markham, Francis, and Martin Young. “Packer’s Barangaroo Casino and the Inevitability of Pokies.” The Conversation 9 July 2013. ‹http://theconversation.com/packers-barangaroo-casino-and-the-inevitability-of-pokies-15892›. Markham, Francis, and Martin Young. “Who Wins from ‘Big Gambling’ in Australia?” The Conversation 6 Mar. 2014. ‹http://theconversation.com/who-wins-from-big-gambling-in-australia-22930›.McMillen, Jan, and Katie Donnelly. "Gambling in Australian Indigenous Communities: The State of Play." The Australian Journal of Social Issues 43.3 (2008): 397. Ohtsuka, Keis, and Thai Ohtsuka. “Vietnamese Australian Gamblers’ Views on Luck and Winning: Universal versus Culture-Specific Schemas.” Asian Journal of Gambling Issues and Public Health 1.1 (2010): 34-46. Scull, Sue, Geoffrey Woolcock. “Problem Gambling in Non-English Speaking Background Communities in Queensland, Australia: A Qualitative Exploration.” International Gambling Studies 5.1 (2005): 29-44. Tanasornnarong, Nattaporn, Alun Jackson, and Shane Thomas. “Gambling among Young Thai People in Melbourne, Australia: An Exploratory Study.” International Gambling Studies 4.2 (2004): 189-203. Thompson, Angela, “Live Gambling Odds Tipped for the Chop.” Illawarra Mercury 22 May 2013: 6. Metherell, Mark. “Virtual Pokie App a Hit - But ‘Not Gambling.’” Sydney Morning Herald 13 Jan. 2013. ‹http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/smartphone-apps/virtual-pokie-app-a-hit--but-not-gambling-20130112-2cmev.html#ixzz2QVlsCJs1›. Worthington, Andrew, et al. "Gambling Participation in Australia: Findings from the National Household Expenditure Survey." Review of Economics of the Household 5.2 (2007): 209-221. Young, Martin, et al. "The Changing Landscape of Indigenous Gambling in Northern Australia: Current Knowledge and Future Directions." International Gambling Studies 7.3 (2007): 327-343. Ziolkowski, S. “The World Count of Gaming Machines 2013.” Gaming Technologies Association, 2014. ‹http://www.gamingta.com/pdf/World_Count_2014.pdf›.

In 2019, Mattel introduced a series of Barbie dolls in connection with National Geographic which included a Polar Marine Biologist, an Entomologist, a Wildlife Photojournalist, and a mostly "made from recycled ocean-bound plastic" Barbie ("Mattel Launches Barbie Loves the Ocean") followed in 2021. One year later, the company issued an "Eco-Leadership Team" composed of a Conservation Scientist, a Renewable Energy Engineer, Chief Sustainability Officer, and Environmental Advocate. This can be understood as an attempt to introduce children to the urgency of ecological issues and communicating to them the importance of research into climate change in an age-appropriate manner. Yet, despite the pedagogical opportunities the dolls might offer, I argue that their introduction and presentation primarily represents an instance of greenwashing, "the act or practice of making a product, policy, activity, etc. appear to be more environmentally friendly or less environmentally damaging than it really is" (Merriam-Webster). In order to support my thesis, I will analyse four issues: first, I will have a closer look at the way in which the four "Eco-Leadership" dolls express ecological concerns. I will then turn to the material Barbie is made of, plastic, and examine its environmental impact together with Mattel's "The Future of Pink Is Green" campaign. Next, I will discuss the conspicuous consumption Barbie models, focussing on the Malibu Dream House. I will address how this is entangled with settler colonialism in the fourth and final part. Eco-Leadership Barbie? The "Eco-Leadership" set, billed as "2022 Career of the Year" collection, consists of four dolls. They come in a cardboard box so that the toys are not immediately visible, and their accessories are stored in a paper bag inside. On the one hand, this makes the dolls less appealing, depriving the potential consumers of visual pleasure. On the other hand, this generates an element of suspense, much like a wrapped present. In keeping with Mattel's slogan "The Future of Pink Is Green", the colour pink is toned down, even though each doll sports at least one accessory in this colour. The toys are sold as a team, thus perhaps suggesting that "eco-leadership" is a collaborative project, which departs from the emphasis on individualism otherwise suggested by Barbie packaging. In their promotional material, Mattel mentions that all of the professional fields the dolls represent are male-dominated ("Barbie Eco-Leadership Team"). The combination of the careers featured makes a telling statement about Mattel's framing of ecological issues. First, there is a Conservation Scientist with binoculars and a notebook, implying that she is undertaking research on larger animals, presumably endangered species. Such a focus on mammals tends to downplay structural issues and the "slow violence" that affects ecological systems, as Arno Hölzer has argued (65). She is joined by a Renewable Energy Engineer with a solar panel, referencing the least controversial form of "green energy". Significantly, this is the classic blond Barbie. Together, these two dolls suggest that science and technology will find solutions to current ecological crises, global warming, et cetera (not that such issues are explicitly mentioned). The third doll is advertised as Chief Sustainability Officer. "She works with a company or organization to make sure their actions and products are economically, environmentally and socially sustainable", as Mattel puts it ("Barbie Eco-Leadership Team"). Here, businesses are portrayed not as the source of environmental pollution, but as part of the solution to the problem. While this is not entirely false, this particular approach to environmental issues is severely limited, firmly remaining within a neoliberal, capitalist ideology. It reflects what Dan Brockington and Rosaleen Duffy, following Sklair, term "mainstream conservation", which "proposes resolutions to environmental problems that hinge on heightened commodity production and consumption" (4). In this context, a company's promotion of "ethical consumption" "achieves its ethically positive results by not counting various aspects of the production and consumption of its commodities" (9). Finally, there's the Environmental Advocate – not activist (the term was probably too controversial). She is always mentioned last. Her poster reads: "Barbie loves the earth", possibly the most inane ecological slogan ever devised. It is made of plastic. Acquainting children with ecological issues in an age-appropriate manner is an important task. Playing environmental advocate, or scientist, might certainly be more educational in terms of ecological issues than many of the other career options the "I can be anything" series features. But the absence of a politician in the set, for instance, speaks volumes. The "recipe" for sustainability the dolls embody only requires a heavy dose of science and technology, whipped up by well-meaning entrepreneurship, with a little love for the planet sprinkled on top. One gets a prettier picture if one looks at the toys from different perspectives. The group is rather diverse, with a Black Conservation Scientist, an Environmental Advocate of Asian descent, and a Chief Sustainability Officer that might be Latinx, and "curvy". Again, though, there is a glaring omission. Indigenous people are not included, despite the fact that, due to environmental racism, they are among the communities most dramatically affected by environmental pollution. Benjamin F. Chavis Jr., who coined the term "environmental racism," defined it as racial discrimination in environmental policy-making, enforcement of regulations and laws, the deliberate targeting of communities of color for toxic waste disposal and the siting of polluting industries … , [and] the history of excluding people of color from the mainstream environmental groups, decision-making boards, commissions, and regulatory bodies. (Chavis 3) The consequences for Native Americans were and are severe. By 1999, Winona LaDuke notes, 317 reservations … [were] threatened by environmental hazards … . Reservations have been targeted as sites for 16 proposed nuclear waste dumps [and] [o]ver 100 … toxic waste [sites] … . There have been 1,000 atomic explosions on Western Shoshone land in Nevada, making the Western Shoshone the most bombed nation on earth. (LaDuke 2-3) The absence of an Indigenous doll in the Barbie "Eco-Leadership Team" is also noteworthy considering the long history of Native American and First Nations resistance to habitat destruction and environmental degradation, from nineteenth-century Lakota Little Thunder and Anishnaabe leader Wabunoquod (LaDuke 3, 5) to the #NoDAPL movement (Gilio-Whitaker 1-13). Following Robin Wall Kimmerer, one could even argue that sustainability, or "beneficial relations between people and the environment", are integral to Native (here: Potawatomi) culture (Kimmerer 6). On a very different note, any ecological consideration of Barbie dolls must also address their material properties. According to Mattel, the four dolls "are made from recycled plastic … , wear clothing made from recycled fabric and are certified CarbonNeutral® products" ("Barbie Eco-Leadership Team"). This does not apply to the heads and the hair, however – arguably the most distinctive parts of the toys. This had already been the case with the "Barbie Loves the Ocean" series ("Mattel Launches Barbie Loves the Ocean") – apparently, this is not an issue that can easily be fixed. In other words, only some components of the dolls are manufactured from recycled plastic. Further, in 2022, over 175 different Barbie dolls circulated, of which at least 166 were not made from recycled plastic (Google). To speak of "eco-leadership" is thus rather misleading. To further examine this, I want to have a closer look at the materials the dolls consist of. Life in Plastic… For a while now, it has become common knowledge that "life in plastic" might not be so "fantastic" after all, Aqua's song notwithstanding. Plastic pollution of the oceans is a huge problem, killing birds, whales, and other seaborne animals; so are non-biodegradable plastic landfill, neo-colonial waste export, the detrimental health effects of phthalates in plastic, and so on (Moore, Freinkel). But what James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello call the uneven "distribution of violence" during the transformation of fossil fuel into plastic is less well known. Oil production and transport are frequently militarised, they show, with company interests taking precedence over human rights (173-74, 176). Heavily guarded pipelines cut through traditional grazing and farming areas, endangering people's livelihoods as well as local ecosystems (Marriott and Minio-Paluello 176, 178-79). To the consumers who buy the plastic produced from this oil, such violence is invisible, not least because production processes and their environmental consequences are actively screened from view by fossil fuel companies and local governments (173-74). "Although these social and environmental impacts are inherent within its constitution, the plastic product in its uniformity is seemingly wiped clean of all that violence and disruption", the authors conclude (181). Where these matters have rarely been discussed in academic research on Barbie, they garnered significant public interest around the time the movie was released in 2023. That the film itself received the Environmental Media Association (EMA) gold seal (Plastic Pollution Coalition) did not lay such concerns to rest. "After the movie frenzy fades, how do we avoid tonnes of Barbie dolls going to landfill?", Alan Pears asked in The Conversation. Waste Online highlighted the "Not-So-Pretty Side of Plastic Toys", Tatler headlined "How Barbie is making climate change worse", and in Medium, Eric Young even aimed to show "How To Save The World from the Toxicity of Barbie!" (with an exclamation rather than a question mark). Based on a 2022 study by Sarah Levesque, Madeline Robertson, and Christie Klimas, Pears noted that "every 182 gram doll caused about 660 grams of carbon emissions, including plastic production, manufacture and transport" (Pears 2). According to Duke Ines, CEO of Lonely Whale, a campaign devoted to protecting the oceans, "80% of all toys end up in a landfill, incinerators, or the ocean" (Mendez 3). Discarded toys make up around 6% of all plastic in landfills (Levesque et al. 777). There are estimates that, by 2030, in the US emissions from plastic production will supersede those from coal (Pears 2). Mattel seems to have recognised the problem. In 2021, the company announced its "The Future of Pink Is Green" campaign as part of its "goal to use 100% recycled, recyclable or bio-based plastic materials and packaging by 2030" ("Mattel Launches" 2). The efforts include educational vlogger episodes and Mattel PlayBack, a toy return program aimed at recycling materials in toy production. With Barbie, this is difficult, though. As Dorothea Ruffin and others have noted, the dolls are composed of different kinds of plastics. The heads consist of hard vinyl, with water-based spray paint used for the eyes; the torso is manufactured from ABS (acrylonitrile butadiene-styrene), the arms of EVA (ethylene-vinyl acetate), and the legs of polypropylene and PVC (polyvinyl chloride) (Ruffin 2). This makes recycling difficult, perhaps even unfeasible. So in effect, I agree with environmental educator Kristy Drutman that Mattel's eco-friendly self-presentation currently qualifies as greenwashing (Mendez 2). With Lyon's and Maxwell's description of the practice as "selective disclosure of positive information about a company's environmental or social performance, without full disclosure of negative information on these dimensions, so as to create an overly positive corporate image" (9) as reference point, it becomes clear that Mattel's strategy perfectly fits this pattern. Their recycling efforts concern only a small number of the Barbie dolls they produce, and even those are only partly fashioned from salvaged material. Both the release of the "Eco-Leadership" set and the "The Future of Pink Is Green" campaign seem designed primarily to bolster the company's reputation. Conspicuous Consumption and the Malibu Dream House A central component of the problem is the scale of plastic toy consumption, as Levesque et al. observe. Mattel sells around 60 million Barbies annually (Ruffin 2). This amounts to over one billion dolls since 1959 (ETX Daily UP 2). What the scientists call "the overproduction and purchase of toys" (Levesque et al. 791) testifies to the continued centrality of "conspicuous consumption", the demonstrative, wasteful squandering of resources which, as Thorstein Veblen already noted in 1899, signifies and produces social distinction (Veblen 53; cf. 43-72). As he argued, "an unremitting demonstration of ability to pay" (Veblen 54) was and is central for upholding not only one's social standing, but also one's self-esteem. This is at the core of Mattel's business model: stimulating repeated purchases by issuing and marketing ever-new, "must-have" dolls, clothing, and other accessories. These tend to normalise an upper-class lifestyle, as Barbie's sports car, horse, and dream house attest. The Malibu Dream House, part of the Barbie universe since 1962, plays a specific role in this context. It symbolises fun, conspicuous leisure, and glamour. With its spectacular beaches, its exclusiveness, and its proximity to Hollywood celebrity culture, Malibu represents the apex of social aspiration for many people. Houses are also sexy, as Marjorie Garber observes in Sex and Real Estate. "Real estate today has become a form of yuppie pornography. … Buyers are entering the housing market with more celerity (and more salaciousness?) than they once entered the marriage market" (Garber 3, 4). The prominence of the house in the Barbie movie is thus not incidental. Malibu is among the most expensive locations in the US. The median property value is US$4.25m. Due to its beachfront location, its "iconic design" and "cultural value", local brokerage Ruby Home estimated that "the price of the doll's DreamHouse [could be] an eye-watering $10 million" (McPherson). With the understatement typical of the profession, the author of the article writes: "unsurprisingly, Barbie’s home would only be available to high-net-worth buyers". This does more than reinforce classism. The richest segment of the global population also has an inordinately large carbon footprint and overall negative impact on climate change. According to Oxfam, the richest 1% produced 16% of global consumption emissions in 2019. The propagation of Malibu Dream House living thus does not exactly rhyme with "eco- leadership". Barbie and Settler Colonialism The wasteful, environmentally detrimental lifestyle of the very wealthy is part and parcel of US settler colonialism. Unlike other forms of colonialism, settler colonialism attempts to replace the Indigenous population. The term does not only signify a devastating past but names an ongoing process, since Native people have not in fact "disappeared". Lorenzo Veracini puts it succinctly: "settler colonialism is not finished" (Veracini 68-94). As Patrick Wolfe famously wrote, "'settler-colonial state' is Australian [and US] society's primary structural characteristic rather than merely a statement about its origins… . Invasion is a structure not an event" (163). Malibu is traditional Chumash territory. The name derives from the Ventureño Chumash word Humaliwo, meaning "where the surf sounds loudly" (Sampson). The Chumash were forcibly deprived of their land by the Spanish Mission system in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Deborah A. Miranda has movingly detailed the traumatic effects of this violence in her memoir Bad Indians. But the Chumash are not gone. In fact, the Wishtoyo Chumach Foundation, whose mission it is to "protect and preserve the culture, history, and lifeways of Chumash and Indigenous peoples, and the environment everyone depends on", runs Chumash Village, "with a goal of raising awareness of Chumash people's historical relationship and dependence upon the natural environment as a maritime people", right in Malibu (Wishtoyo Chumach Foundation). None of this is mentioned by Mattel or the Greta Gerwig movie, which does not only signal a missed opportunity to demonstrate "eco-leadership". Rather, such an omission is typical for settler colonial culture. In order to buttress their claim to the land, settlers try to write Indigenous people out of North American history through a strategy White Earth Ojibwe scholar Jean O'Brien has called "firsting", that is, claiming the European settlers were there first, they "discovered" something, etc. The opening of the movie is a classic example. To the voiceover of "since the beginning of time – since the first little girl ever existed", it shows not Native inhabitants, but European American children in vaguely historical, possibly nineteenth century settler clothing. At other points, Barbie's and Ken's cowboy outfits, their glaring whiteness, references to Davy Crockett and, as Stentor Danielson mentioned in their presentation on "Barbieland's Fantasy Ecology: Terra Nullius on the Pink Beach" at the conference "'You Can Be Anything': Imagining and Interrogating Barbie in Popular Culture", to the Black Hills aka Mount Rushmore, clearly mark them as settlers. J.M. Bacon has coined the term "colonial ecological violence" to reference the ways in which environmental degradation and settler colonialism are inextricably intertwined (59). Effectively combatting environmental pollution thus also requires addressing settler colonial economic, social, and cultural structures. As Dina Gilio-Whitaker has forcefully argued, the success of environmental justice movements in the US, especially vis-à-vis the fossil fuel industry, may depend on building coalitions with Indigenous activists. Some of the most promising examples actually come from California, where beaches have been protected from corporate development because sacred Native sites would have been negatively affected (148). "It may well be that organizing around Native land rights holds the key to successfully transitioning from a fossil-fuel energy infrastructure to one based on sustainable energy", Gilio-Whitaker concludes (149). "Effective partnerships with allies in the environmental movement will provide the best defence for the collective well-being of the environment and future generations of all Americans, Native and non-Native alike" (162). This is a far cry from any policy Mattel has so far advertised, not to mention implemented. Conclusion In different respects, the promise of "Eco-Leadership" Barbies rings hollow. Not only do they suggest an extremely limited understanding of environmental concerns and challenges, Mattel's breezy pronouncements are clearly at odds with its simultaneous boosting of conspicuous consumption, let alone the focus on financial profit generally characteristic for its managerial decisions. In light of the enormous environmental problems generated by the manufacturing and disposal of the dolls, the waste-intensive upper-class lifestyle Barbie outfits and accessories promote, and finally the de-thematising of capitalism and settler colonialism both in Mattel's Barbie discourses and the 2023 Barbie movie, the company's attempts to project an ecologically conscious image seem primarily designed to capitalise on an increasing awareness of ecological problems in Mattel's target audience, rather than constituting a serious reconsideration of its unsustainable corporate strategies. References Bacon, J.M. "Settler Colonialism as an Eco-Social Structure and the Production of Colonial Ecological Violence." Environmental Sociology 5.1 (2019): 59-69. Brockington, Dan, and Rosaleen Duffy. "Introduction: Capitalism and Conservation: The Production and Reproduction of Biodiversity Conservation." In Capitalism and Conservation, eds. Dan Brockington and Rosaleen Duffy. 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As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock. Boston: Beacon P, 2019. Google. "How Many Different Barbies Are There 2022?" 11 May 2022. 17 May 2024 <https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=Barbie+how+many+2022+releases%3F>. Gordon, Noah. “Barbie and the Problem with Plastic.” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 20 July 2023. 16 Feb. 2024 <https://carnegieendowment.org/2023/07/20/barbie-and-problem-with-plastic-pub-90241>. Merriam-Webster. “Greenwashing.” N.d. 5 May. 2024 <https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/greenwashing>. Hölzer, Arno. "Aesthetic Strategies of the WWF – Reinforcing the Culture-Nature Dichotomy." MA thesis. Berlin: Humboldt University, 2018. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants. Milkweed Editions, 2013. LaDuke, Winona. All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 1999. Levesque, Sarah, Madeline Robertson, and Christie Klimas. “A Life Cycle Assessment of the Environmental Impact of Children's Toys.” Sustainable Production and Consumption 31 (2022): 777–93. Lyon, T.P., and A.W. Maxwell, "Greenwash: Corporate Environmental Disclosure under Threat of Audit." Journal of Economics and Management Strategy 20 (2011): 3-41. Marriott, James, and Mika Minio-Paluello. “Where Does This Stuff Come From? Oil, Plastic, and the Distribution of Violence.” Accumulation: The Material Politics of Plastic. Eds. Jennifer Gabrys, Gay Hawkins, and Mike Michael. London: Routledge, 2013. 171–83. Mattel. "Barbie Eco-Leadership Team (2022 Career of the Year Four Doll Set)." Product Description. N.d. 28 Jan. 2024 <https://creations.mattel.com/products/barbie-eco-leadership-team-2022-career-of-the-year-four-doll-set-hcn25>. ———. "Barbie Sustainability / The Future of Pink Is Green." 11 Apr. 2024. 29 Jan. 2024 <https://shop.mattel.com/pages/barbie-sustainability>. ———. 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In Mardi and a Voyage Thither, novelist Herman Melville writes of the peculiar and startling confluence of memory, objects, valuation, and disfigurement that mark the collector of obsoletia. The story’s antiquary is the picture of perverse depletion, with a body “crooked, and dwarfed, and surmounted by a hump, that sat on his back like a burden” (328), his hut in shambles, and “the precious antiques, and curios, and obsoletes”—the objects of his collection—“strewn about, all dusty and disordered” (329). This unkempt display cum impromptu museum turns out to present a mere fraction of the curator’s collection, the rest of which is host to countless subtle molds and ravenous worms in a vast catacomb below ground. Traversing this darkened vault, one visitor says, is “like going down to posterity” (332). As inveterate accumulators ourselves, we can certainly relate to Mardi’s "extraordinary antiquarian": pursuing obsolete things has transformed us too (though hopefully not quite so hideously), as well as the work we do and the spaces we do it in. Since 1999, we have been collecting—and subsequently lending out to scholars the world over—computer games, systems, and game-related paraphernalia. By recent estimates, our Learning Games Initiative Archive contains more than 20,000 artifacts, from Venezuelan Pong clones to Mario-themed lollipops. Archival work at this scale and with this diversity is not easy, and it constantly butts up against a host of intractable questions. For example, what does it mean to isolate a thing that no longer has its original value but has taken on a new one? When researchers hold such transmuted artifacts up for inspection, what are they looking for and how might archivists help them to find it? Is the primary work of computer game archivists (and indeed archivists of all types) to protect artifacts from the elements, to enjoin them upon their kin, and to guard over the collection for the sake of some abstract posterity, or is it something more collaborative and communal? Finally, is it possible for research-oriented collectors to engage the process of collection without suffering the deformations of skin and soul (not to mention pocketbook) that often plague the more solipsistic acquirer? We offer this article as an entrée to these questions, as a way to begin to attend to some of the theoretical and practical complexities of obsolescence and its negotiation. We do so primarily by focusing on where those complexities intersect with computer games, the new media we collect and study. Circuitous Obsolescence Melville finished Mardi in 1849, almost fifty years after Joseph Marie Jacquard invented the programmable loom and twelve years after Charles Babbage theorised the possibility of a programmable mechanical computer. The subsequent history of the development of the modern computer and its applications (including computer games) typically gets told as a narrative of technological novelty followed by ineluctable obsolescence—Herman Hollerith’s tabulator to Konrad Zuse’s Z3 to the US Army’s Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) and so on. This kind of monumentalised and narrativised history exemplifies an onward march much fetishised by the marketplace: once introduced, a given technology will be developed then updated, upgraded, and improved, inevitably producing a staggering wake of tired-and-true archaeological assemblages. These cast-offs, however, are only useless to those who prefer to consume at the cutting edge, and even that is an illusory experience. Like a well-designed knife whose business end is supported by the stout spine behind it, the edgiest of today’s computer games and peripherals—from the most non-directive sandbox titles to the most obscene add-ons—are merely vanguards to a half-century of industrial history. In etymological terms, “obsolete” captures the conundrum well. A combination of ob (away) and solere (to be used to, accustomed), the word “obsolete” has at least four distinct meanings: “no longer used or practiced”; “worn away, dilapidated, atrophied”; “indistinct, hardly perceptible, vestigial”; and as a noun, “A thing which is out of date or has fallen into disuse.” In each usage, present and past are both integral and palpable. As archivists, we appreciate this temporal distillation because it illustrates how seamless yet discernable is the paradoxical binding between old and new. “Obsolescence” thus functions like a rhetorical ouroboros, ensuring that reflection on the antique reveals the avant-garde and vice-versa. Consider, for example, the Atari 2600 paddle. Compared to a PlayStation 3 controller, with its variety of buttons, sticks, and pads—and the re-mapability of all these input elements—the single potentiometer and button of the paddle seem downright antiquated. Moreover, because Atari hardware in general has largely faded from mainstream use (though it has a remarkable half-life in collectible markets), the paddle is mostly neglected by contemporary players and pundits alike, in the process revealing another obsolescence: the static state that accompanies disuse—the waiting nonlife of discarded technology. The paddle's first obsolescence—the supplantation of the state of the art—signifies a moment of loss. An obsolete computer game controller is one that no longer holds or is capable of provoking the novelty necessary to stake a claim on wonder, or at least that part of wonder engendered in the playing of the newest game on the newest console—the farthest distance from technological obsolescence. The paddle's second obsolescence—disuse—signifies potential: when a newer system (e.g., PlayStation 3) supersedes an older one (e.g., Atari 2600), the older one will often sit like a fact in benighted spaces such as attics, thrift stores, garages, and closets—all prime hunting grounds for computer game collectors. The ephemera that for most people drift toward oblivion get picked up by archivists and cleaned off, catalogued, stored, studied, used, and reused. Trash becomes treasure, obsolescence newness and utility. And yet, obsolescence is not solely in the eye of the beholder, as it were; it is also in the hand, which further complicates the concept. Because obsolescence calls on the familiar in a pejorative sense—the obsolete thing has become too familiar (it now lacks novelty and surprise)—it is easy to overlook the necessity of familiarity (and thus obsolescence) to computer game development and play. After all, play demands familiarity as well as novelty; deeply complex and satisfying tasks—the kind the best play sets out and rewards generously—can only be accomplished with a level of mastery, of skill born of familiarity born of practice. Just as metaphors, in order to be successful, must merge the known with the unknown in an instantaneous insight that reveals fresh understanding, so too must computer games blend the tried and true with a twist to provoke profound and prolonged play. Computer games must always be the same, only different, familiar enough to be recognisable as forms, but new enough to create wonder as ludica. In the elegant prose of game scholar Roger Caillois, [games] must be like the leaves on the trees which survive from one season to the next and remain identical. Games must be ever similar to animal skins, the design on butterfly wings, and the spiral curves of shell fish which are transmitted unchanged from generation to generation. However, games do not have this hereditary sameness. They are innumerable and changeable. They are clad in thousands of unequally distributed shapes, just as vegetable species are, but infinitely more adaptable, spreading and acclimating themselves with disconcerting ease. (81) All this is what makes computer games so difficult to collect and study, to preserve and produce. They are always already both obsolete and pioneering. Memory as the Arbiter of Obsolescence Despite its plasticity, the concept of obsolescence offers a kind of security to its invoker: in theory, functionality and use follow a clean, linear progression. Accordingly, obsolescence can be seen not only as a thin pretext to justify a rabid consumerist desire for newness, but also as a brief memorial, a marker of passing, one that reaffirms an orderly universe and transfers a degree of security to those who witness its passing. As Aristotle explains, “the criterion of ‘security’ is the ownership of property in such places and under such conditions that the use of it is in our power; and it is ‘our own’ if it is in our power to dispose of it or keep it” (1341). Security is thus the power of alienation, and calling on the concept of obsolescence encourages the exercise of that power. Indeed, as theorist and collector Walter Benjamin argues, “The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them” (62). This magic circle is really no different from the one play sociologist Johann Huizinga uses to describe the “temporary worlds” that can be carved out of the workaday one, worlds created and encapsulated by the rules and possibilities of play. There is, in fact, a powerful parallel between play and collecting, with each territorialising and deterritorialising the practice of materiality and its pleasures. For the collector, the magic circle not only encompasses the library or archive, but potentially the world, harboring as it does the possibility of a "complete collection," however obscured or damaged such a collection might be. This magic circle can also be constructed anywhere, and out of anything because the collector is a playful, nearly absurd, hunter of things whose best work occurs on the road: “I have made my most memorable purchases on trips, as a transient. Property and possession belong to the tactical sphere” (Benjamin 64). For computer game collectors especially, the circumference of the magic circle grows not with the size of a collection but with the imaginative ability to learn how to unsee what she or he has been taught to see as obsolete by industry and popular culture both: industrial, ludic, aesthetic, narratological, and ideological design. It is thus memory—in its alembic ability to make and unmake, to be made and unmade—that is the ultimate arbiter of obsolescence. From this perspective, all that is obsolete fashions a kind of infinite immemorial compendium of “what has been” that makes “what is” possible. Benjamin calls this a “magic encyclopedia,” an expansive tome for the archivist that contains “The period, the region, the craftsmanship, the former ownership—for a true collector the whole background of an item” that constitutes its being both in and beyond its present time and place (62). Vivacious Obsolescence Memory notwithstanding, the crux of computer game collection—the problematic that makes both body and mind “crooked and dwarfed”—is the timelessness of play itself. What is "old" play, for example? The kind found in Missile Command (Atari, 1980) or other golden age arcade game? Perhaps, but is this play still old when it is brought to a new platform and new audiences (e.g., http://macmost.com/iphonegames/MissileCommand.html)? What of the computer game consoles that facilitate play? Surely they grow obsolete, replaced every several years by newer, more advanced incarnations. And yet in the homebrew, retro, and collectible markets, it is the new things, the new playables that are strangely obsolete and undesirable. They are merely extant, whereas reconfigurations of old machines require imaginative new remediations in order to work and to satisfy. Older technologies and the play they enable are what are very much alive and on the cusp; these things, not their newer cousins, are the source of interest, value, experimentation, discourse, and play, that is, they are the cutting edge. So what, then, does it mean to collect and study obsoletia when the play intrinsic to them thwarts obsolescence at every turn? For computer game collectors, the answer is that ultimately there can be no difference between fad and fashion, prototype and stereotype. Obsolescence is a dynamic and incomplete designation because computer games do not age in quite the same way as do other things. The power and potential of a game archive is therefore overwhelming as well as invigorating, offering the rare but challenging chance not only to tame something wild (temporarily at least), but also to perform resurrections, bringing the old dead into new life. Computer game archivists thus trade daily in vivacious obsolescence, reveling in the defiance of moribundity in which their artifacts partake. Still, this liveliness creates other problems. How, for instance, does one organise the contents of an archive that can be categorised in so many ways (e.g., age, developer, play styles, content genres, system, audio-visual aesthetic, and so on)? What is the appropriate taxonomic way of seeing technological and ludic history when the artifacts that embody this history are constantly being made and remade, not only by scholars and historians, but also by subcultures, franchise agents, and myriad avenues of pop culture reappropriation? What does it mean for knowledge work when newness and obsolescence persist in equal measure in the same artifact? The answers to such questions are, of course, only ever temporary and never more than rickety. In the words of Benjamin, “[T]his or any other procedure is merely a dam against the springtide of memories which surges toward any collector as he contemplates his possessions” (61). The art of collection itself is one of defiance in the face of insurmountable complexity and multiplying articulations, which in the end is perhaps the real pleasure of collecting. The trial before computer game collectors is to have a sturdy boat at the ready, one capable of enduring that surging springtide to which Benjamin refers, when the well-disciplined dam of categorical judgments and explanatory structures—itself always already obsolete—inevitably breaks apart.References Aristotle. Rhetoric. Trans. W. Rhys Roberts. In The Basic Works of Aristotle. Ed. Richard McKeon. New York: Random House, 2001. 1325-1451. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. London: Pimlico: 1999. Caillois, Roger. Man, Play and Games. Urbana: University of Illinois, 2001. Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Boston: Beacon, 1955. Melville, Herbert. Mardi and a Voyage Thither. Ed. Nathalia Wright. Putney: Hendricks House, 1990.

Historically the impact of the printing press on Western culture is a truism. Print gave rise to the mass reproduction and circulation of information with wide reaching consequences in all fields: political, social, and economic. An aspect that this paper wishes to focus on is that this moment also saw the birth (and necessity) of copyright legislation, to administer and protect this new found ability to package and disseminate text. The term copyright itself, used freely in debates surrounding contemporary topics such as iTunes, DVD piracy, and file-sharing, is not only semantically anachronistic but, as will be shown, is an anachronistic problem. The history that it carries, through almost three hundred years, underscores the difficulties at the heart of copyright in the contemporary scene. Indeed the reliance on copyright in these debates creates an argument based on circular definitions relating to only the statutory conception of cultural rights. No avenue is really left to imagine a space outside its jurisdiction. This paper asserts that notions of the “culture industry” (as opposed to some other conception of culture) are also inherently connected to the some three hundred years of copyright legislation. Our conceptions of the author and of intellectual pursuits as property can also be traced within this relatively small period. As clarified by Lord Chief Baron Pollock in the English courts in 1854, “copyright is altogether an artificial right” that does not apply at common law and relies wholly on statute (Jeffreys v Boosey). Foucault (124-42) highlights, in his attack on Romantic notions of the author-genius-God, that the author-function is expressed primarily as a legal term, through the legal concepts of censorship and copyright. Copyright, then, pays little attention to non-economic interests of the author and is used primarily to further economic interests. The corporate nature of the culture industry at present amounts to the successful application of copyright legislation in the past. This paper suggests that we look at our conception of literary and artistic work as separate from copyright’s own definitions of intellectual property and the commercialisation of culture. From Hogarth to File-Sharing The case of ‘DVD Jon’ is instructive. In 1999, Jon Lech Johansen, a Norwegian programmer, drew the ire of Hollywood by breaking the encryption code for DVDs (in a program called DeCSS). More recently, he has devised a program to circumvent the anti-piracy system for Apple’s iTunes music download service. With this program, called PyMusique, users still have to pay for the songs, but once these are paid for, users can use the songs on all operating systems and with no limits on copying, transfers or burning. Johansen, who publishes his wares on his blog entitled So Sue Me, was in fact sued in 1999 by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) for copyright infringement. He argued that he created DeCSS as part of developing a DVD player for his Linux operating system, and that copying DVD movies was an ancillary function of the program for which he could not be held responsible. He was acquitted by an Oslo district court in early 2003 and again by an appeals court later that year. During this time many people on the internet found novel ways to publish the DeCSS code so as to avoid prosecution, including many different code encryptions incorporated into jpeg images (including the trademarked DVD logo, owned by DVD LLC) and mpeg movies, as an online MUD game scenario, and even produced in the form of a haiku (“42 Ways to Distribute DeCSS”). The ability to publish the code in a format not readily prosecutable owes less to encryption and clandestine messages than it does to anachronistic laws regarding the wholly legal right to original formats. Prior to 1709, copyright or licensing related to the book publishing industry where the work as formatted, pressed and disseminated was more important to protect than the text itself or the concept of the author as the writer of the text. Even today different copyrights may be held over the different formatting of the same text. The ability for hackers to attack the copyright legislation through its inherent anachronism is more than smart lawyering or a neat joke. These attacks, based on file sharing and the morphing fluid forms of information (rather than contained text, printed, broadcast, or expressed through form in general), amount to a real breach in copyright’s capability to administer and protect information. That the corporations are so excited and scared of these new technologies of dissemination should come as no surprise. It should also not be seen, as some commentators wish to, as a completely new approach to the dissemination of culture. If copyright was originally intended to protect the rights of the publisher, the passing of the Act of Anne in 1709 introduced two new concepts – an author being the owner of copyright, and the principle of a fixed term of protection for published works. In 1734, William Hogarth, wanting to ensure profits would flow from his widely disseminated prints (which attracted many pirate copies), fought to have these protections extended to visual works. What is notable about all this is that in 1734 the concept of copyright both in literary and artistic works applied only to published or reproduced works. It would be over one hundred years later, in the Romantic period, that a broader protection to all artworks would be available (for example, paintings, sculpture, etc). Born primarily out of guild systems, the socio-political aspect of protection, although with a passing nod to the author, was primarily a commercial concern. These days the statute has muddied its primary purpose; commercial interest is conflated and confused with the moral rights of the author (which, it might be added, although first asserted in the International Berne Convention of 1886 were only ratified in Australia in December 2000). For instance, in a case such as Sony Entertainment (Australia) Ltd v Smith (2005), both parties in fact want the protection of copyright. On one day the DJ in question (Pee Wee Ferris) might be advertising himself through his DJ name as an appropriative, sampling artist-author, while at the same time, we might assume, wishing to protect his own rights as a recording artist. Alternatively, the authors of the various DeCSS code works want both the free flow of information which then results in a possible free flow of media content. Naturally, this does not sit well with the current lords of copyright: the corporations. The new open-source author works contrary to all copyright. Freed Slaves The model of the open source author is not without precedent. Historically, prior to copyright and the culture industry, this approach to authorship was the norm. The Roman poet Martial, known for his wit and gifts of poetry, wrote I commend to you, Quintianus, my little books – if I can call them mine when your poet recites them: if they complain of their harsh servitude, you should come forward as their champion and give your guarantees; and when he calls himself their master you should say they are mine and have been granted their freedom. If you shout this out three or four times, you will make their kidnapper (plagiario) feel ashamed of himself. Here of course the cultural producer is a landed aristocrat (a situation common to early Western poets such as Chaucer, Spencer and More). The poem, or work, exists in the economy of the gift. The author-function here is also not the same as in modern times but was based on the advantages of reputation and celebrity within the Roman court. Similarly other texts such as stories, songs and music were circulated, prior to print, in a primarily oral economy. Later, with the rise of the professional guild system in late medieval times, the patronage system did indeed pay artists, sometimes royal sums. However, this bursary was not so much for the work than for upkeep as members of the household holding a particular skill. The commercial aspect of the author as owner only became fully realised with the rise of the middle classes in the eighteenth and nineteenth century and led to the global adoption of the copyright regime as the culture industry’s sanction. Added to this, the author is now overwhelmingly a corporation, not an individual, which has expanded the utilisation of these statutes for commercial advantage to, perhaps, an unforeseen degree. To understand the file-sharing period, which we are now entering at full speed, we cannot be confused by notions found in the copyright acts; definitions based on copyright cannot adequately express a culture without commercial concerns. Perhaps the discussion needs to return to concepts that predate copyright, before the author-function (as suggested by Foucault) and before the notion of intellectual property. That we have returned to a gift economy for cultural products is easily understood in the context of file-sharing. But what of the author? Here the figure of the hacker suggests a movement towards such an archaic model where the author’s remuneration comes in the form of celebrity, or a reputation as an exciting innovator. Another model, which is perhaps more likely, is an understanding that certain material disseminated will be sold and administered under copyright for profit and that the excess will be quickly and efficiently disseminated with no profit and with no overall duration of protection. Such an amalgamated approach is exemplified by Radiohead’s Kid A album, which, although available for free downloads, was still profitable because the (anachronistic) printed version, with its cover and artwork, still sold by the millions. Perhaps cultural works, the slaves of the author-corporation, should be granted their freedom: freedom from servitude to a commercial master, freedom to be re-told rather than re-sold, with due attribution to the author the only payment. This is a Utopian idea perhaps, but no less a fantasy than the idea that the laws of copyright, born of the printing press, can evolve to match the economy today that they purport to control. When thinking about ownership and authorship today, it must be recalled that copyright itself has a history of useful fictions. References Michel Foucault; “What Is an Author?” Twentieth-Century Literary Theory. Eds. Vassilis Lambropoulos and David Neal Miller. Albany: State UP of New York, 1987. 124-42. “42 Ways to Distribute DeCSS.” 5 Jun. 2005 http://decss.zoy.org/>. Jeffreys v Boosey, 1854. Johansen, Jon Lech. So Sue Me. 5 Jun. 2005 http://www.nanocrew.net/blog/>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Phillips, Dougal, and Oliver Watts. "Copyright, Print and Authorship in the Culture Industry." M/C Journal 8.2 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/06-phillipswatts.php>. APA Style Phillips, D., and O. Watts. (Jun. 2005) "Copyright, Print and Authorship in the Culture Industry," M/C Journal, 8(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/06-phillipswatts.php>.

1. Guy Debord in the Land of the Long WeekendIt’s the weekend – leisure time. It’s the interlude when, Guy Debord contends, the proletarian is briefly free of the “total contempt so clearly built into every aspect of the organization and management of production” in commodity capitalism; when workers are temporarily “treated like grown-ups, with a great show of solicitude and politeness, in their new role as consumers.” But this patronising show turns out to be another form of subjection to the diktats of “political economy”: “the totality of human existence falls under the regime of the ‘perfected denial of man’.” (30). As Debord suggests, even the creation of leisure time and space is predicated upon a form of contempt: the “perfected denial” of who we, as living people, really are in the eyes of those who presume the power to legislate our working practices and private identities.This Saturday The Weekend Australian runs an opinion piece by Christopher Pearson, defending ABC Radio National’s Stephen Crittenden, whose program The Religion Report has been axed. “Some of Crittenden’s finest half-hours have been devoted to Islam in Australia in the wake of September 11,” Pearson writes. “Again and again he’s confronted a left-of-centre audience that expected multi-cultural pieties with disturbing assertions.” Along the way in this admirable Crusade, Pearson notes that Crittenden has exposed “the Left’s recent tendency to ally itself with Islam.” According to Pearson, Crittenden has also thankfully given oxygen to claims by James Cook University’s Mervyn Bendle, the “fairly conservative academic whose work sometimes appears in [these] pages,” that “the discipline of critical terrorism studies has been captured by neo-Marxists of a postmodern bent” (30). Both of these points are well beyond misunderstanding or untested proposition. If Pearson means them sincerely he should be embarrassed and sacked. But of course he does not and will not be. These are deliberate lies, the confabulations of an eminent right-wing culture warrior whose job is to vilify minorities and intellectuals (Bendle escapes censure as an academic because he occasionally scribbles for the Murdoch press). It should be observed, too, how the patent absurdity of Pearson’s remarks reveals the extent to which he holds the intelligence of his readers in contempt. And he is not original in peddling these toxic wares.In their insightful—often hilarious—study of Australian opinion writers, The War on Democracy, Niall Lucy and Steve Mickler identify the left-academic-Islam nexus as the brain-child of former Treasurer-cum-memoirist Peter Costello. The germinal moment was “a speech to the Australian American Leadership Dialogue forum at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2005” concerning anti-Americanism in Australian schools. Lucy and Mickler argue that “it was only a matter of time” before a conservative politician or journalist took the plunge to link the left and terrorism, and Costello plunged brilliantly. He drew a mental map of the Great Chain of Being: left-wing academics taught teacher trainees to be anti-American; teacher trainees became teachers and taught kids to be anti-American; anti-Americanism morphs into anti-Westernism; anti-Westernism veers into terrorism (38). This is contempt for the reasoning capacity of the Australian people and, further still, contempt for any observable reality. Not for nothing was Costello generally perceived by the public as a politician whose very physiognomy radiated smugness and contempt.Recycling Costello, Christopher Pearson’s article subtly interpellates the reader as an ordinary, common-sense individual who instinctively feels what’s right and has no need to think too much—thinking too much is the prerogative of “neo-Marxists” and postmodernists. Ultimately, Pearson’s article is about channelling outrage: directing the down-to-earth passions of the Australian people against stock-in-trade culture-war hate figures. And in Pearson’s paranoid world, words like “neo-Marxist” and “postmodern” are devoid of historical or intellectual meaning. They are, as Lucy and Mickler’s War on Democracy repeatedly demonstrate, mere ciphers packed with the baggage of contempt for independent critical thought itself.Contempt is everywhere this weekend. The Weekend Australian’s colour magazine runs a feature story on Malcolm Turnbull: one of those familiar profiles designed to reveal the everyday human touch of the political classes. In this puff-piece, Jennifer Hewett finds Turnbull has “a restless passion for participating in public life” (20); that beneath “the aggressive political rhetoric […] behind the journalist turned lawyer turned banker turned politician turned would-be prime minister is a man who really enjoys that human interaction, however brief, with the many, many ordinary people he encounters” (16). Given all this energetic turning, it’s a wonder that Turnbull has time for human interactions at all. The distinction here of Turnbull and “many, many ordinary people” – the anonymous masses – surely runs counter to Hewett’s brief to personalise and quotidianise him. Likewise, those two key words, “however brief”, have an unfortunate, unintended effect. Presumably meant to conjure a picture of Turnbull’s hectic schedules and serial turnings, the words also convey the image of a patrician who begrudgingly knows one of the costs of a political career is that common flesh must be pressed—but as gingerly as possible.Hewett proceeds to disclose that Turnbull is “no conservative cultural warrior”, “onfounds stereotypes” and “hates labels” (like any baby-boomer rebel) and “has always read widely on political philosophy—his favourite is Edmund Burke”. He sees the “role of the state above all as enabling people to do their best” but knows that “the main game is the economy” and is “content to play mainstream gesture politics” (19). I am genuinely puzzled by this and imagine that my intelligence is being held in contempt once again. That the man of substance is given to populist gesturing is problematic enough; but that the Burke fan believes the state is about personal empowerment is just too much. Maybe Turnbull is a fan of Burke’s complex writings on the sublime and the beautiful—but no, Hewett avers, Turnbull is engaged by Burke’s “political philosophy”. So what is it in Burke that Turnbull finds to favour?Turnbull’s invocation of Edmund Burke is empty, gestural and contradictory. The comfortable notion that the state helps people to realise their potential is contravened by Burke’s view that the state functions so “the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection… by a power out of themselves” (151). Nor does Burke believe that anyone of humble origins could or should rise to the top of the social heap: “The occupation of an hair-dresser, or of a working tallow-chandler, cannot be a matter of honour to any person… the state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule” (138).If Turnbull’s main game as a would-be statesman is the economy, Burke profoundly disagrees: “the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, callico or tobacco, or some other such low concern… It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection”—a sublime entity, not an economic manager (194). Burke understands, long before Antonio Gramsci or Louis Althusser, that individuals or social fractions must be made admirably “obedient” to the state “by consent or force” (195). Burke has a verdict on mainstream gesture politics too: “When men of rank sacrifice all ideas of dignity to an ambition without a distinct object, and work with low instruments and for low ends, the whole composition [of the state] becomes low and base” (136).Is Malcolm Turnbull so contemptuous of the public that he assumes nobody will notice the gross discrepancies between his own ideals and what Burke stands for? His invocation of Burke is, indeed, “mainstream gesture politics”: on one level, “Burke” signifies nothing more than Turnbull’s performance of himself as a deep thinker. In this process, the real Edmund Burke is historically erased; reduced to the status of stage-prop in the theatrical production of Turnbull’s mass-mediated identity. “Edmund Burke” is re-invented as a term in an aesthetic repertoire.This transmutation of knowledge and history into mere cipher is the staple trick of culture-war discourse. Jennifer Hewett casts Turnbull as “no conservative culture warrior”, but he certainly shows a facility with culture-war rhetoric. And as much as Turnbull “confounds stereotypes” his verbal gesture to Edmund Burke entrenches a stereotype: at another level, the incantation “Edmund Burke” is implicitly meant to connect Turnbull with conservative tradition—in the exact way that John Howard regularly self-nominated as a “Burkean conservative”.This appeal to tradition effectively places “the people” in a power relation. Tradition has a sublimity that is bigger than us; it precedes us and will outlast us. Consequently, for a politician to claim that tradition has fashioned him, that he is welded to it or perhaps even owns it as part of his heritage, is to glibly imply an authority greater than that of “the many, many ordinary people”—Burke’s hair-dressers and tallow-chandlers—whose company he so briefly enjoys.In The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton assesses one of Burke’s important legacies, placing him beside another eighteenth-century thinker so loved by the right—Adam Smith. Ideology of the Aesthetic is premised on the view that “Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body”; that the aesthetic gives form to the “primitive materialism” of human passions and organises “the whole of our sensate life together… a society’s somatic, sensational life” (13). Reading Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, Eagleton discerns that society appears as “an immense machine, whose regular and harmonious movements produce a thousand agreeable effects”, like “any production of human art”. In Smith’s work, the “whole of social life is aestheticized” and people inhabit “a social order so spontaneously cohesive that its members no longer need to think about it.” In Burke, Eagleton discovers that the aesthetics of “manners” can be understood in terms of Gramscian hegemony: “in the aesthetics of social conduct, or ‘culture’ as it would later be called, the law is always with us, as the very unconscious structure of our life”, and as a result conformity to a dominant ideological order is deeply felt as pleasurable and beautiful (37, 42). When this conservative aesthetic enters the realm of politics, Eagleton contends, the “right turn, from Burke” onwards follows a dark trajectory: “forget about theoretical analysis… view society as a self-grounding organism, all of whose parts miraculously interpenetrate without conflict and require no rational justification. Think with the blood and the body. Remember that tradition is always wiser and richer than one’s own poor, pitiable ego. It is this line of descent, in one of its tributaries, which will lead to the Third Reich” (368–9).2. Jean Baudrillard, the Nazis and Public MemoryIn 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the Third Reich’s Condor Legion of the Luftwaffe was on loan to Franco’s forces. On 26 April that year, the Condor Legion bombed the market-town of Guernica: the first deliberate attempt to obliterate an entire town from the air and the first experiment in what became known as “terror bombing”—the targeting of civilians. A legacy of this violence was Pablo Picasso’s monumental canvas Guernica – the best-known anti-war painting in art history.When US Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations on 5 February 2003 to make the case for war on Iraq, he stopped to face the press in the UN building’s lobby. The doorstop was globally televised, packaged as a moment of incredible significance: history in the making. It was also theatre: a moment in which history was staged as “event” and the real traces of history were carefully erased. Millions of viewers world-wide were undoubtedly unaware that the blue backdrop before which Powell stood was specifically designed to cover the full-scale tapestry copy of Picasso’s Guernica. This one-act, agitprop drama was a splendid example of politics as aesthetic action: a “performance” of history in the making which required the loss of actual historical memory enshrined in Guernica. Powell’s performance took its cues from the culture wars, which require the ceaseless erasure of history and public memory—on this occasion enacted on a breathtaking global, rather than national, scale.Inside the UN chamber, Powell’s performance was equally staged-crafted. As he brandished vials of ersatz anthrax, the power-point behind him (the theatrical set) showed artists’ impressions of imaginary mobile chemical weapons laboratories. Powell was playing lead role in a kind of populist, hyperreal production. It was Jean Baudrillard’s postmodernism, no less, as the media space in which Powell acted out the drama was not a secondary representation of reality but a reality of its own; the overheads of mobile weapons labs were simulacra, “models of a real without origins or reality”, pictures referring to nothing but themselves (2). In short, Powell’s performance was anchored in a “semiurgic” aesthetic; and it was a dreadful real-life enactment of Walter Benjamin’s maxim that “All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war” (241).For Benjamin, “Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate.” Fascism gave “these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.” In turn, this required “the introduction of aesthetics into politics”, the objective of which was “the production of ritual values” (241). Under Adolf Hitler’s Reich, people were able to express themselves but only via the rehearsal of officially produced ritual values: by their participation in the disquisition on what Germany meant and what it meant to be German, by the aesthetic regulation of their passions. As Frederic Spotts’ fine study Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics reveals, this passionate disquisition permeated public and private life, through the artfully constructed total field of national narratives, myths, symbols and iconographies. And the ritualistic reiteration of national values in Nazi Germany hinged on two things: contempt and memory loss.By April 1945, as Berlin fell, Hitler’s contempt for the German people was at its apogee. Hitler ordered a scorched earth operation: the destruction of everything from factories to farms to food stores. The Russians would get nothing, the German people would perish. Albert Speer refused to implement the plan and remembered that “Until then… Germany and Hitler had been synonymous in my mind. But now I saw two entities opposed… A passionate love of one’s country… a leader who seemed to hate his people” (Sereny 472). But Hitler’s contempt for the German people was betrayed in the blusterous pages of Mein Kampf years earlier: “The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous” (165). On the back of this belief, Hitler launched what today would be called a culture war, with its Jewish folk devils, loathsome Marxist intellectuals, incitement of popular passions, invented traditions, historical erasures and constant iteration of values.When Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer fled Fascism, landing in the United States, their view of capitalist democracy borrowed from Benjamin and anticipated both Baudrillard and Guy Debord. In their well-know essay on “The Culture Industry”, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, they applied Benjamin’s insight on mass self-expression and the maintenance of property relations and ritual values to American popular culture: “All are free to dance and enjoy themselves”, but the freedom to choose how to do so “proves to be the freedom to choose what is always the same”, manufactured by monopoly capital (161–162). Anticipating Baudrillard, they found a society in which “only the copy appears: in the movie theatre, the photograph; on the radio, the recording” (143). And anticipating Debord’s “perfected denial of man” they found a society where work and leisure were structured by the repetition-compulsion principles of capitalism: where people became consumers who appeared “s statistics on research organization charts” (123). “Culture” came to do people’s thinking for them: “Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown” (144).In this mass-mediated environment, a culture of repetitions, simulacra, billboards and flickering screens, Adorno and Horkheimer concluded that language lost its historical anchorages: “Innumerable people use words and expressions which they have either ceased to understand or employ only because they trigger off conditioned reflexes” in precisely the same way that the illusory “free” expression of passions in Germany operated, where words were “debased by the Fascist pseudo-folk community” (166).I know that the turf of the culture wars, the US and Australia, are not Fascist states; and I know that “the first one to mention the Nazis loses the argument”. I know, too, that there are obvious shortcomings in Adorno and Horkheimer’s reactions to popular culture and these have been widely criticised. However, I would suggest that there is a great deal of value still in Frankfurt School analyses of what we might call the “authoritarian popular” which can be applied to the conservative prosecution of populist culture wars today. Think, for example, how the concept of a “pseudo folk community” might well describe the earthy, common-sense public constructed and interpellated by right-wing culture warriors: America’s Joe Six-Pack, John Howard’s battlers or Kevin Rudd’s working families.In fact, Adorno and Horkheimer’s observations on language go to the heart of a contemporary culture war strategy. Words lose their history, becoming ciphers and “triggers” in a politicised lexicon. Later, Roland Barthes would write that this is a form of myth-making: “myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things.” Barthes reasoned further that “Bourgeois ideology continuously transforms the products of history into essential types”, generating a “cultural logic” and an ideological re-ordering of the world (142). Types such as “neo-Marxist”, “postmodernist” and “Burkean conservative”.Surely, Benjamin’s assessment that Fascism gives “the people” the occasion to express itself, but only through “values”, describes the right’s pernicious incitement of the mythic “dispossessed mainstream” to reclaim its voice: to shout down the noisy minorities—the gays, greenies, blacks, feminists, multiculturalists and neo-Marxist postmodernists—who’ve apparently been running the show. Even more telling, Benjamin’s insight that the incitement to self-expression is connected to the maintenance of property relations, to economic power, is crucial to understanding the contemptuous conduct of culture wars.3. Jesus Dunked in Urine from Kansas to CronullaAmerican commentator Thomas Frank bases his study What’s the Matter with Kansas? on this very point. Subtitled How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Frank’s book is a striking analysis of the indexation of Chicago School free-market reform and the mobilisation of “explosive social issues—summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art—which it then marries to pro-business policies”; but it is the “economic achievements” of free-market capitalism, “not the forgettable skirmishes of the never-ending culture wars” that are conservatism’s “greatest monuments.” Nevertheless, the culture wars are necessary as Chicago School economic thinking consigns American communities to the rust belt. The promise of “free-market miracles” fails ordinary Americans, Frank reasons, leaving them in “backlash” mode: angry, bewildered and broke. And in this context, culture wars are a convenient form of anger management: “Because some artist decides to shock the hicks by dunking Jesus in urine, the entire planet must remake itself along the lines preferred” by nationalist, populist moralism and free-market fundamentalism (5).When John Howard received the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute’s Irving Kristol Award, on 6 March 2008, he gave a speech in Washington titled “Sharing Our Common Values”. The nub of the speech was Howard’s revelation that he understood the index of neo-liberal economics and culture wars precisely as Thomas Frank does. Howard told the AEI audience that under his prime ministership Australia had “pursued reform and further modernisation of our economy” and that this inevitably meant “dislocation for communities”. This “reform-dislocation” package needed the palliative of a culture war, with his government preaching the “consistency and reassurance” of “our nation’s traditional values… pride in her history”; his government “became assertive about the intrinsic worth of our national identity. In the process we ended the seemingly endless seminar about that identity which had been in progress for some years.” Howard’s boast that his government ended the “seminar” on national identity insinuates an important point. “Seminar” is a culture-war cipher for intellection, just as “pride” is code for passion; so Howard’s self-proclaimed achievement, in Terry Eagleton’s terms, was to valorise “the blood and the body” over “theoretical analysis”. This speaks stratospheric contempt: ordinary people have their identity fashioned for them; they need not think about it, only feel it deeply and passionately according to “ritual values”. Undoubtedly this paved the way to Cronulla.The rubric of Howard’s speech—“Sharing Our Common Values”—was both a homage to international neo-conservatism and a reminder that culture wars are a trans-national phenomenon. In his address, Howard said that in all his “years in politics” he had not heard a “more evocative political slogan” than Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America”—the rhetorical catch-cry for moral re-awakening that launched the culture wars. According to Lawrence Grossberg, America’s culture wars were predicated on the perception that the nation was afflicted by “a crisis of our lack of passion, of not caring enough about the values we hold… a crisis of nihilism which, while not restructuring our ideological beliefs, has undermined our ability to organise effective action on their behalf”; and this “New Right” alarmism “operates in the conjuncture of economics and popular culture” and “a popular struggle by which culture can lead politics” in the passionate pursuit of ritual values (31–2). When popular culture leads politics in this way we are in the zone of the image, myth and Adorno and Horkheimer’s “trigger words” that have lost their history. In this context, McKenzie Wark observes that “radical writers influenced by Marx will see the idea of culture as compensation for a fragmented and alienated life as a con. Guy Debord, perhaps the last of the great revolutionary thinkers of Europe, will call it “the spectacle”’ (20). Adorno and Horkheimer might well have called it “the authoritarian popular”. As Jonathan Charteris-Black’s work capably demonstrates, all politicians have their own idiolect: their personally coded language, preferred narratives and myths; their own vision of who “the people” might or should be that is conjured in their words. But the language of the culture wars is different. It is not a personal idiolect. It is a shared vocabulary, a networked vernacular, a pervasive trans-national aesthetic that pivots on the fact that words like “neo-Marxist”, “postmodern” and “Edmund Burke” have no historical or intellectual context or content: they exist as the ciphers of “values”. And the fact that culture warriors continually mouth them is a supreme act of contempt: it robs the public of its memory. And that’s why, as Lucy and Mickler’s War on Democracy so wittily argues, if there are any postmodernists left they’ll be on the right.Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer and, later, Debord and Grossberg understood how the political activation of the popular constitutes a hegemonic project. The result is nothing short of persuading “the people” to collaborate in its own oppression. The activation of the popular is perfectly geared to an age where the main stage of political life is the mainstream media; an age in which, Charteris-Black notes, political classes assume the general antipathy of publics to social change and act on the principle that the most effective political messages are sold to “the people” by an appeal “to familiar experiences”—market populism (10). In her substantial study The Persuaders, Sally Young cites an Australian Labor Party survey, conducted by pollster Rod Cameron in the late 1970s, in which the party’s message machine was finely tuned to this populist position. The survey also dripped with contempt for ordinary people: their “Interest in political philosophy… is very low… They are essentially the products (and supporters) of mass market commercialism”. Young observes that this view of “the people” was the foundation of a new order of political advertising and the conduct of politics on the mass-media stage. Cameron’s profile of “ordinary people” went on to assert that they are fatally attracted to “a moderate leader who is strong… but can understand and represent their value system” (47): a prescription for populist discourse which begs the question of whether the values a politician or party represent via the media are ever really those of “the people”. More likely, people are hegemonised into a value system which they take to be theirs. Writing of the media side of the equation, David Salter raises the point that when media “moguls thunder about ‘the public interest’ what they really mean is ‘what we think the public is interested in”, which is quite another matter… Why this self-serving deception is still so sheepishly accepted by the same public it is so often used to violate remains a mystery” (40).Sally Young’s Persuaders retails a story that she sees as “symbolic” of the new world of mass-mediated political life. The story concerns Mark Latham and his “revolutionary” journeys to regional Australia to meet the people. “When a political leader who holds a public meeting is dubbed a ‘revolutionary’”, Young rightly observes, “something has gone seriously wrong”. She notes how Latham’s “use of old-fashioned ‘meet-and-greet’campaigning methods was seen as a breath of fresh air because it was unlike the type of packaged, stage-managed and media-dependent politics that have become the norm in Australia.” Except that it wasn’t. “A media pack of thirty journalists trailed Latham in a bus”, meaning, that he was not meeting the people at all (6–7). He was traducing the people as participants in a media spectacle, as his “meet and greet” was designed to fill the image-banks of print and electronic media. Even meeting the people becomes a media pseudo-event in which the people impersonate the people for the camera’s benefit; a spectacle as artfully deceitful as Colin Powell’s UN performance on Iraq.If the success of this kind of “self-serving deception” is a mystery to David Salter, it would not be so to the Frankfurt School. For them, an understanding of the processes of mass-mediated politics sits somewhere near the core of their analysis of the culture industries in the “democratic” world. I think the Frankfurt school should be restored to a more important role in the project of cultural studies. Apart from an aversion to jazz and other supposedly “elitist” heresies, thinkers like Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer and their progeny Debord have a functional claim to provide the theory for us to expose the machinations of the politics of contempt and its aesthetic ruses.ReferencesAdorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso, 1979. 120–167.Barthes Roland. “Myth Today.” Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. St Albans: Paladin, 1972. 109–58.Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zorn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 217–251.Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.Charteris-Black, Jonathan. Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994.Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.Frank, Thomas. What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004.Grossberg, Lawrence. “It’s a Sin: Politics, Post-Modernity and the Popular.” It’s a Sin: Essays on Postmodern Politics & Culture. Eds. Tony Fry, Ann Curthoys and Paul Patton. Sydney: Power Publications, 1988. 6–71.Hewett, Jennifer. “The Opportunist.” The Weekend Australian Magazine. 25–26 October 2008. 16–22.Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Trans. Ralph Manheim. London: Pimlico, 1993.Howard, John. “Sharing Our Common Values.” Washington: Irving Kristol Lecture, American Enterprise Institute. 5 March 2008. ‹http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,233328945-5014047,00html›.Lucy, Niall and Steve Mickler. The War on Democracy: Conservative Opinion in the Australian Press. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2006.Pearson, Christopher. “Pray for Sense to Prevail.” The Weekend Australian. 25–26 October 2008. 30.Salter, David. The Media We Deserve: Underachievement in the Fourth Estate. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2007. Sereny, Gitta. Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth. London: Picador, 1996.Spotts, Frederic. Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. London: Pimlico, 2003.Wark, McKenzie. The Virtual Republic: Australia’s Culture Wars of the 1990s. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1997.Young, Sally. The Persuaders: Inside the Hidden Machine of Political Advertising. Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2004.

Photograph by Gonzalo Echeverria (2010)“I must plunge again and again in the water of doubt” (Wittgenstein 1e). The Holy Grail in the phenomenology of religion (and, to a lesser extent, the sociology of religion) is a definition of religion that actually works, but, so far, this seems to have been elusive. Classical definitions of religion—substantive (e.g. Tylor) and functionalist (e.g. Durkheim)—fail, in part because they attempt to be in three places at once, as it were: they attempt to distinguish religion from non-religion; they attempt to capture what religions have in common; and they attempt to grasp the “heart”, or “core”, of religion. Consequently, family resemblance definitions of religion replace certainty and precision for its own sake with a more pragmatic and heuristic approach, embracing doubt and putting forward definitions that give us a better understanding (Verstehen) of religion. In this paper, I summarise some “new” definitions of religion that take this approach, before proposing and defending another one, defining religion as non-propositional and “apophatic”, thus accepting that doubt is central to religion itself, as well as to the analysis of religion.The question of how to define religion has had real significance in a number of court cases round the world, and therefore it does have an impact on people’s lives. In Germany, for example, the courts ruled that Scientology was not a religion, but a business, much to the displeasure of the Church of Scientology (Aldridge 15). In the United States, some advocates of Transcendental Meditation (TM) argued that TM was not a religion and could therefore be taught in public schools without violating the establishment clause in the constitution—the separation of church and state. The courts in New Jersey, and federal courts, ruled against them. They ruled that TM was a religion (Barker 146). There are other cases that I could cite, but the point of this is simply to establish that the question has a practical importance, so we should move on.In the classical sociology of religion, there are a number of definitions of religion that are quite well known. Edward Tylor (424) defined religion as a belief in spiritual beings. This definition does not meet with widespread acceptance, the notable exception being Melford Spiro, who proposed in 1966 that religion was “an institution consisting of culturally patterned interaction with culturally postulated super-human beings” (Spiro 96, see also 91ff), and who has bravely stuck to that definition ever since. The major problem is that this definition excludes Buddhism, which most people do regard as a religion, although some people try to get round the problem by claiming that Buddhism is not really a religion, but more of a philosophy. But this is cheating, really, because a definition of religion must be descriptive as well as prescriptive; that is, it must apply to entities that are commonly recognised as religions. Durkheim, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, proposed that religion had two key characteristics, a separation of the sacred from the profane, and a gathering together of people in some sort of institution or community, such as a church (Durkheim 38, 44). However, religions often reject a separation of the sacred from the profane. Most Muslims and many Calvinist Christians, for example, would insist strongly that everything—including the ostensibly profane—is equally subject to the sovereignty of God. Also, some religions are more oriented to a guru-pupil kind of relationship, rather than a church community.Weber tried to argue that religion should only be defined at the end of a long process of historical and empirical study. He is often criticised for this, although there probably is some wisdom in his argument. However, there seems to be an implicit definition of religion as theodicy, accounting for the existence of evil and the existence of suffering. But is this really the central concern of all religions?Clarke and Byrne, in their book Religion Defined and Explained, construct a typology of definitions, which I think is quite helpful. Broadly speaking, there are two types of classical definition. Firstly, there are substantive definitions (6), such as Tylor’s and Spiro’s, which posit some sort of common “property” that religions “have”—“inside” them, as it were. Secondly, functionalist definitions (Clarke and Byrne 7), such as Durkheim’s, define religion primarily in terms of its social function. What matters, as far as a definition of religion is concerned, is not what you believe, but why you believe it.However, these classical definitions do not really work. I think this is because they try to do too many things. For a strict definition of religion to work, it needs to tell us (i) what religions have in common, (ii) what distinguishes religion on the one hand from non-religion, or everything that is not religion, on the other, and (iii) it needs to tell us something important about religion, what is at the core of religion. This means that a definition of religion has to be in three places at once, so to speak. Furthermore, a definition of religion has to be based on extant religions, but it also needs to have some sort of quasi-predictive capacity, the sort of thing that can be used in a court case regarding, for example, Scientology or Transcendental Meditation.It may be possible to resolve the latter problem by a gradual process of adjustment, a sort of hermeneutic circle of basing a definition on extant religions and applying it to new ones. But what about the other problem, the one of being in three places at once?Another type identified by Clarke and Byrne, in their typology of definitions, is the “family resemblance” definition (11-16). This derives from the later Wittgenstein. The “family resemblance” definition of religion is based on the idea that religions commonly share a number of features, but that no one religion has all of them. For example, there are religious beliefs, doctrines and mythos—or stories and parables. There are rituals and moral codes, institutions and clergy, prayers, spiritual emotions and experiences, etc. This approach is of course less precise than older substantive and functional definitions, but it also avoids some of the problems associated with them.It does so by rethinking the point of defining religion. Instead of being precise and rigorous for the sake of it, it tries to tell us something, to be “productive”, to help us understand religion better. It eschews certainty and embraces doubt. Its insights could be applied to some schools of philosophy (e.g. Heideggerian) and practical spirituality, because it does not focus on what is distinctive about religion. Rather, it focuses on the core of religion, and, secondarily, on what religions have in common. The family resemblance approach has led to a number of “new” definitions (post-Durkheim definitions) being proposed, all of which define religion in a less rigorous, but, I hope, more imaginative and heuristic way.Let me provide a few examples, starting with two contrasting ones. Peter Berger in the late 1960s defined religion as “the audacious attempt to conceive of the entire universe as humanly significant”(37), which implies a consciousness of an anthropocentric sacred cosmos. Later, Alain Touraine said that religion is “the apprehension of human destiny, existence, and death”(213–4), that is, an awareness of human limitations, including doubt. Berger emphasises the high place for human beings in religion, and even a sort of affected certainty, while Touraine emphasises our place as doubters on the periphery, but it seems that religion exists within a tension between these two opposites, and, in a sense, encompasses them both.Richard Holloway, former Bishop of Edinburgh in the Scottish Episcopal Church and arch-nemesis of the conservative Anglicans, such as those from Sydney, defines religion as like good poetry, not bad science. It is easy to understand that he is criticising those who see religion, particularly Christianity, as centrally opposed to Darwin and evolution. Holloway is clearly saying that those people have missed the point of their own faith. By “good poetry”, he is pointing to the significance of storytelling rather than dogma, and an open-ended discussion of ultimate questions that resists the temptation to end with “the moral of the story”. In science (at least before quantum physics), there is no room for doubt, but that is not the case with poetry.John Caputo, in a very energetic book called On Religion, proposes what is probably the boldest of the “new” definitions. He defines religion as “the love of God” (1). Note the contrast with Tylor and Spiro. Caputo does not say “belief in God”; he says “the love of God”. You might ask how you can love someone you don’t believe in, but, in a sense, this paradox is the whole point. When Caputo says “God”, he is not necessarily talking in the usual theistic or even theological terms. By “God”, he means the impossible made possible (10). So a religious person, for Caputo, is an “unhinged lover” (13) who loves the impossible made possible, and the opposite is a “loveless lout” who is only concerned with the latest stock market figures (2–3). In this sense of religious, a committed atheist can be religious and a devout Catholic or Muslim or Hindu can be utterly irreligious (2–3). Doubt can encompass faith and faith can encompass doubt. This is the impossible made possible. Caputo’s approach here has something in common with Nietzsche and especially Kierkegaard, to whom I shall return later.I would like to propose another definition of religion, within the spirit of these “new” definitions of religion that I have been discussing. Religion, at its core, I suggest, is non-propositional and apophatic. When I say that religion is non-propositional, I mean that religion will often enact certain rituals, or tell certain stories, or posit faith in someone, and that propositional statements of doctrine are merely reflections or approximations of this non-propositional core. Faith in God is not a proposition. The Eucharist is not a proposition. Prayer is not, at its core, a proposition. Pilgrimage is not a proposition. And it is these sorts of things that, I suggest, form the core of religion. Propositions are what happen when theologians and academics get their hands on religion, they try to intellectualise it so that it can be made to fit within their area of expertise—our area of expertise. But, that is not where it belongs. Propositions about rituals impose a certainty on them, whereas the ritual itself allows for courage in the face of doubt. The Maundy Thursday service in Western Christianity includes the stripping of the altar to the accompaniment of Psalm 22 (“My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me”), ending the service without a dismissal (Latin missa, the origin of the English “mass”) and with the church in darkness. Doubt, confusion, and bewilderment are the heart and soul of this ritual, not orthodox faith as defined propositionally.That said, religion does often involve believing, of some kind (though it is not usually as central as in Christianity). So I say that religion is non-propositional and apophatic. The word “apophatic”, though not the concept, has its roots in Greek Orthodox theology, where St Gregory Palamas argues that any statement about God—and particularly about God’s essence as opposed to God’s energies—must be paradoxical, emphasising God’s otherness, and apophatic, emphasising God’s essential incomprehensibility (Armstrong 393). To make an apophatic statement is to make a negative statement—instead of saying God is king, lord, father, or whatever, we say God is not. Even the most devout believer will recognise a sense in which God is not a king, or a lord, or a father. They will say that God is much greater than any of these things. The Muslim will say “Allahu Akhbar”, which means God is greater, greater than any human description. Even the statement “God exists” is seen to be well short of the mark. Even that is human language, which is why the Cappadocian fathers (Saints Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory Naziansus) said that they believed in God, while refusing to say that God exists.So to say that religion is at its core non-propositional is to say that religious beliefs are at their core apophatic. The idea of apophasis is that by a process of constant negation you are led into silence, into a recognition that there is nothing more that can be said. St Thomas Aquinas says that the more things we negate about God, the more we say “God is not…”, the closer we get to what God is (139). Doubt therefore brings us closer to the object of religion than any putative certainties.Apophasis does not only apply to Christianity. I have already indicated that it applies also to Islam, and the statement that God is greater. In Islam, God is said to have 99 names—or at least 99 that have been revealed to human beings. Many of these names are apophatic. Names like The Hidden carry an obviously negative meaning in English, while, etymologically, “the Holy” (al-quddu-s) means “beyond imperfection”, which is a negation of a negation. As-salaam, the All-Peaceful, means beyond disharmony, or disequilibrium, or strife, and, according to Murata and Chittick (65–6), “The Glorified” (as-subbuh) means beyond understanding.In non-theistic religions too, an apophatic way of believing can be found. Key Buddhist concepts include sunyata, emptiness, or the Void, and anatta, meaning no self, the belief or realisation that the Self is illusory. Ask what they believe in instead of the Self and you are likely to be told that you are missing the point, like the Zen pupil who confused the pointing finger with the moon. In the Zen koans, apophasis plays a major part. One well-known koan is “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Any logical answers will be dismissed, like Thomas Aquinas’s statements about God, until the pupil gets beyond logic and achieves satori, or enlightenment. Probably the most used koan is Mu—Master Joshu is asked if a dog has Buddha-nature and replies Mu, meaning “no” or “nothing”. This is within the context of the principle that everything has Buddha-nature, so it is not logical. But this apophatic process can lead to enlightenment, something better than logic. By plunging again and again in the water of doubt, to use Wittgenstein’s words, we gain something better than certainty.So not only is apophasis present in a range of different religions—and I have given just a few examples—but it is also central to the development of religion in the Axial Age, Karl Jaspers’s term for the period from about 800-200 BCE when the main religious traditions of the world began—monotheism in Israel (which also developed into Christianity and Islam), Hinduism and Buddhism in India, Confucianism and Taoism in China, and philosophical rationalism in Greece. In the early Hindu traditions, there seems to have been a sort of ritualised debate called the Brahmodya, which would proceed through negation and end in silence. Not the silence of someone admitting defeat at the hands of the other, but the silence of recognising that the truth lay beyond them (Armstrong 24).In later Hinduism, apophatic thought is developed quite extensively. This culminates in the idea of Brahman, the One God who is Formless, beyond all form and all description. As such, all representations of Brahman are equally false and therefore all representations are equally true—hence the preponderance of gods and idols on the surface of Hinduism. There is also the development of the idea of Atman, the universal Self, and the Buddhist concept anatta, which I mentioned, is rendered anatman in Sanskrit, literally no Atman, no Self. But in advaita Hinduism there is the idea that Brahman and Atman are the same, or, more accurately, they are not two—hence advaita, meaning “not two”. This is negation, or apophasis. In some forms of present-day Hinduism, such as the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (commonly known as the Hare Krishnas), advaita is rejected. Sometimes this is characterised as dualism with respect to Brahman and Atman, but it is really the negation of non-dualism, or an apophatic negation of the negation.Even in early Hinduism, there is a sort of Brahmodya recounted in the Rig Veda (Armstrong 24–5), the oldest extant religious scripture in the world that is still in use as a religious scripture. So here we are at the beginning of Axial Age religion, and we read this account of creation:Then was not non-existent nor existent: there was no realm of air, no sky beyond it.Death was not then, nor was there aught immortal.Darkness there was: at first concealed in darkness this All was indiscriminated chaos.All that existed then was void and form less.Sages who searched with their heart's thought discovered the existent's kinship in the non-existent.Who verily knows and who can here declare it, whence it was born and whence comes this creation?The Gods are later than this world's production. Who knows then whence it first came into being?He, the first origin of this creation, whether he formed it all or did not form it,Whose eye controls this world in highest heaven, he verily knows it, or perhaps he knows not.(Rig Veda Book 10, Hymn 129, abridged)And it would seem that this is the sort of thought that spread throughout the world as a result of the Axial Age and the later spread of Axial and post-Axial religions.I could provide examples from other religious traditions. Taoism probably has the best examples, though they are harder to relate to the traditions that are more familiar in the West. “The way that is spoken is not the Way” is the most anglicised translation of the opening of the Tao Te Ching. In Sikhism, God’s formlessness and essential unknowability mean that God can only be known “by the Guru’s grace”, to quote the opening hymn of the Guru Granth Sahib.Before I conclude, however, I would like to anticipate two criticisms. First, this may only be applicable to the religions of the Axial Age and their successors, beginning with Hinduism and Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism, and early Jewish monotheism, followed by Jainism, Christianity, Islam and so on. I would like to find examples of apophasis at the core of other traditions, including Indigenous Australian and Native American ones, for example, but that is work still to be done. Focusing on the Axial Age does historicise the argument, however, at least in contrast with a more universal concept of religion that runs the risk of falling into the ahistorical homo religiosus idea that humans are universally and even naturally religious. Second, this apophatic definition looks a bit elitist, defining religion in terms that are relevant to theologians and “religious virtuosi” (to use Weber’s term), but what about the ordinary believers, pew-fillers, temple-goers? In response to such criticism, one may reply that there is an apophatic strand in what Niebuhr called the religions of the disinherited. In Asia, devotion to the Buddha Amida is particularly popular among the poor, and this involves a transformation of the idea of anatta—no Self—into an external agency, a Buddha who is “without measure”, in terms of in-finite light and in-finite life. These are apophatic concepts. In the Christian New Testament, we are told that God “has chosen the foolish things of this world to shame the wise, the weak to shame the strong…, the things that are not to shame the things that are” (1 Corinthians 1:27). The things that are not are the apophatic, and these are allied with the foolish and the weak, not the educated and the powerful.One major reason for emphasising the role of apophasis in religious thought is to break away from the idea that the core of religion is an ethical one. This is argued by a number of “liberal religious” thinkers in different religious traditions. I appreciate their reasons, and I am reluctant to ally myself with their opponents, who include the more fundamentalist types as well as some vocal critics of religion like Dawkins and Hitchens. However, I said that I would return to Kierkegaard, and the reason is this. Kierkegaard distinguishes between the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. Of course, religion has an aesthetic and an ethical dimension, and in some religions these dimensions are particularly important, but that does not make them central to religion as such. Kierkegaard regarded the religious sphere as radically different from the aesthetic or even the ethical, hence his treatment of the story of Abraham going to Mount Moriah to sacrifice his son, in obedience to God’s command. His son was not killed in the end, but Abraham was ready to do the deed. This is not ethical. This is fundamentally and scandalously unethical. Yet it is religious, not because it is unethical and scandalous, but because it pushes us to the limits of our understanding, through the waters of doubt, and then beyond.Were I attempting to criticise religion, I would say it should not go there, that, to misquote Wittgenstein, the limits of my understanding are the limits of my world, whereof we cannot understand thereof we must remain silent. Were I attempting to defend religion, I would say that this is its genius, that it can push back the limits of understanding. I do not believe in value-neutral sociology, but, in this case, I am attempting neither. ReferencesAldridge, Alan. Religion in the Contemporary World. Cambridge: Polity, 2000.Aquinas, Thomas. “Summa of Christian Teaching”. An Aquinas Reader. ed. Mary Clarke. New York: Doubleday, 1972.Armstrong, Karen. The Great Transformation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.Barker, Eileen. New Religious Movements: a Practical Introduction. London: HMSO, 1989.Berger, Peter. The Social Reality of Religion. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.Caputo, John. On Religion. London: Routledge, 2001.Clarke, Peter, and Peter Byrne, eds. Religion Defined and Explained. New York: St Martin’s Press. 1993.Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press, 1995.Holloway, Richard. Doubts and Loves. Edinburgh: Caqnongate, 2002.Jaspers, Karl. The Origin and Goal of History. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1977.Kierkegaard, Søren. Either/Or. London: Penguin, 1992.———. Fear and Trembling. London: Penguin, 1986.Murata, Sachiko, and William Chittick. The Vision of Islam. St Paul, Minnesota: Paragon House, 1994.Niebuhr, H. Richard. The Social Sources of Denominationalism. New York: Holt, 1929.Spiro, Melford. “Religion: Problems of Definition and Explanation.” Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion. Ed. Michael Banton. London: Tavistock, 1966. 85–126.Touraine, Alain. The Post-Industrial Society. London: Wilwood House, 1974.Tylor, Edward. Primitive Culture. London: Murray, 1903.Weber, Max. The Sociology of Religion. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991.Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough. Nottingham: Brynmill Press, 1979.

Introduction: Artist Villages in Beijing Many of the most renowned sites of Beijing are found in the inner-city districts of Dongcheng and Xicheng: for instance, the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, the Lama Temple, the National Theatre, the Central Opera Academy, the Bell Tower, the Drum Tower, the Imperial College, and the Confucius Temple. However, in the past decade a new attraction has been added to the visitor “must-see” list in Beijing. The 798 Art District originated as an artist village within abandoned factory buildings at Dashanzi, right between the city’s Central Business District and the open outer rural space on Beijing’s north-east. It is arguably the most striking symbol of China’s contemporary art scene. The history of the 798 Art District is by now well known (Keane), so this paper will provide a short summary of its evolution. Of more concern is the relationship between the urban fringe and what Howard Becker has called “art worlds.” By art worlds, Becker refers to the multitude of agents that contribute to a final work of art: for instance, people who provide canvasses, frames, and art supplies; critics and intermediaries; and the people who run exhibition services. To the art-world list in Beijing we need to add government officials and developers. To date there are more than 100 artist communities or villages in Beijing; almost all are located in the city’s outskirts. In particular, a high-powered art centre outside the city of Beijing has recently established a global reputation. Songzhuang is situated in outer Tongzhou District, some 30 kilometres east of Tiananmen Square. The Beijing Municipal Government officially classifies Songzhuang as the Capital Art District (CAD) or “the Songzhuang Original Art Cluster.” The important difference between 798 and Songzhuang is that, whereas the former has become a centre for retail and art galleries, Songzhuang operates as an arts production centre for experimental art, with less focus on commercial art. The destiny of the artistic communities is closely related to urban planning policies that either try to shut them down or protect them. In this paper I will take a close look at three artist villages: Yuanmingyuan, 798, and Songzhuang. In tracing the evolution of the three artist villages, I will shed some light on artists’ lives in city fringes. I argue that these outer districts provide creative industries with a new opportunity for development. This is counter to the conventional wisdom that central urban areas are the ideal locality for creative industries. Accordingly, this argument needs to be qualified: some types of creative work are more suitable to rural and undeveloped areas. The visual art “industry” is one of these. Inner and Outer Worlds Urban historians contend that innovation is more likely to happen in inner urban areas because of intensive interactions between people (Jacobs). City life has been associated with the development of creative industries and economic benefits brought about by the interaction of creative classes. In short, the argument is that cities, or, more specifically, urban areas are primary economic entities (Montgomery) whereas outer suburbs are uncreative and dull (Florida, "Cities"). The conventional wisdom is that talented creative people are attracted to the creative milieu in cities: universities, book shops, cafes, museums, theatres etc. These are both the hard and the soft infrastructure of modern cities. They illustrate diversified built forms, lifestyles and experiences (Lorenzen and Frederiksen; Florida, Rise; Landry; Montgomery; Leadbeater and Oakley). The assumption that inner-city density is the cradle of creative industries has encountered critique. Empirical studies in Australia have shown that creative occupations are found in relatively high densities in urban fringes. The point made in several studies is that suburbia has been neglected by scholars and policy makers and may have potential for future development (Gibson and Brennan-Horley; Commission; Collis, Felton, and Graham). Moreover, some have argued that the practice of constructing inner city enclaves may be leading to homogenized and prescriptive geographies (Collis, Felton, and Graham; Kotkin). As Jane Jacobs has indicated, it is not only density of interactions but diversity that attracts and accommodates economic growth in cities. However, the spatiality of creative industries varies across different sectors. For example, media companies and advertising agencies are more likely to be found in the inner city, whereas most visual artists prefer working in the comparatively quiet and loosely-structured outskirts. Nevertheless, the logic embodied in thinking around the distinctions between “urbanism” and “suburbanism” pays little attention to this issue, although both schools acknowledge the causal relationship between locality and creativity. According to Drake, empirical evidence shows that the function of locality is not only about encouraging interactions between SMEs (small to medium enterprises) within clusters which can generate creativity, but also a catalyst for individual creativity (Drake). Therefore for policy makers in China, the question here is how to plan or prepare a better space to accommodate creative professionals’ needs in different sectors while making the master plan. This question is particularly urgent to the Chinese government, which is undertaking a massive urbanization transition throughout the country. In placing a lens on Beijing, it is important to note the distinctive features of its politics, forms of social structure, and climate. As Zhu has described it, Beijing has spread in a symmetrical structure. The reasons have much to do with ancient history. According to Zhu, the city which was planned in the era of Genghis Khan was constituted by four layers or enclosures, with the emperor at the centre, surrounded by the gentry and other populations distributed outwards according to wealth, status, and occupation. The outer layer accommodated many lower social classes, including itinerant artists, musicians, and merchants. This ”outer city” combined with open rural space. The system of enclosures is carried on in today’s city planning of Beijing. Nowadays Beijing is most commonly described by its ring roads (Mars and Hornsby). However, despite the existing structure, new approaches to urban policy have resulted in a great deal of flux. The emergence of new landscapes such as semi-urbanized villages, rural urban syndicates (chengxiang jiehebu), and villages-within-cities (Mars and Hornsby 290) illustrate this flux. These new types of landscapes, which don’t correspond to the suburban concept that we find in the US or Australia, serve to represent and mediate the urban-rural relationship in China. The outer villages also reflect an old tradition of “recluse” (yin shi), which since the Wei and Jin Dynasties allowed intellectuals to withdraw themselves from the temporal world of the city and live freely in the mountains. The Lost Artistic Utopia: Yuanmingyuan Artist Village Yuanmingyuan, also known as the Ming Dynasty summer palace, is located in Haidian District in the north-west of Beijing. Haidian has transformed from an outer district of Beijing into one of its flourishing urban districts since the mid-1980s. Haidian’s success is largely due to the electronics industry which developed from spin-offs from Peking University, Tsinghua University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in the 1980s. This led to the rapid emergence of Zhongguancun, sometimes referred to as China’s Silicon Valley. However there is another side of Haidian’s transformation. As the first graduates came out of Chinese Academies of the Arts following the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), creative lifestyles became available. Some people quit jobs at state-owned institutions and chose to go freelance, which was unimaginable in China under the former regime of Mao Zedong. By 1990, the earliest “artist village” emerged around the Yuanmingyuan accommodating artists from around China. The first site was Fuyuanmen village. Artists living and working there proudly called their village “West Village” in China, comparing it to the Greenwich Village in New York. At that time they were labelled as “vagabonds” (mangliu) since they had no family in Beijing, and no stable job or income. Despite financial difficulties, the Yuanmingyuan artist village was a haven for artists. They were able to enjoy a liberating and vigorous environment by being close to the top universities in Beijing[1]. Access to ideas was limited in China at that time so this proximity was a key ingredient. According to an interview by He Lu, the Yuanmingyuan artist village gave artists a sense of belonging which went far beyond geographic identification as a marginal group unwelcomed by conservative urban society. Many issues arose along with the growth of the artist village. The non-traditional lifestyle and look of these artists were deemed abnormal by many of the general public; the way of their expression and behaviour was too extreme to be accepted by the mainstream in what was ultimately a political district; they were a headache for local police who saw them as troublemakers; moreover, their contact with the western world was a sensitive issue for the government at that time. Suddenly, the village was closed by the government in 1993. Although the Yuanmingyuan artist village existed for only a few years, it is of significance in China’s contemporary art history. It is the birth place of the cynical realism movement as well as the genesis of Fang Lijun, Zhang Xiaogang and Yue Mingjun, now among the most successful Chinese contemporary artists in global art market. The Starting Point of Art Industry: 798 and Songzhuang After the Yuanmingyuan artist village was shut down in 1993, artists moved to two locations in the east of Beijing to escape from the government and embrace the free space they longed for. One was 798, an abandoned electronic switching factory in Beijing’s north-east urban fringe area; the other was Songzhuang in Tongzhou District, a further twenty kilometres east. Both of these sites would be included in the first ten official creative clusters by Beijing municipal government in 2006. But instead of simply being substitutes for the Yuanmingyuan artist village, both have developed their own cultures, functioning and influencing artists’ lives in different ways. Songzhuang is located in Tongzhou which is an outer district in Beijing’s east. Songzhuang was initially a rural location; its livelihood was agriculture and industry. Just before the closing down of the Yuanmingyuan village, several artists including Fang Lijun moved to this remote quiet village. Through word of mouth, more artists followed their steps. There are about four thousand registered artists currently living in Songzhuang now; it is already the biggest visual art community in Beijing. An artistic milieu and a local sense of place have grown with the increasing number of artists. The local district government invests in building impressive exhibition spaces and promoting art in order to bring in more tourists, investors and artists. Compared with Songzhuang, 798 enjoys a favourable location along the airport expressway, between the capital airport and the CBD of Beijing. The unused electronics plant was initially rented as classrooms by the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in the 1990s. Then several artists moved their studios and workshops to the area upon eviction from the Yuanmingyuan village. Until 2002 the site was just a space to rent cheap work space, a factor that has stimulated many art districts globally (Zukin). From that time the resident artists began to plan how to establish a contemporary art district in China. Led by Huang Rui, a leading visual artist, the “798 collective” launched arts events and festivals, notably a “rebuilding 798” project of 2003. More galleries, cafés, bars, and restaurants began to set up, culminating in a management takeover by the Chaoyang District government with the Seven Stars Group[2] prior to the Beijing Olympics. The area now provides massive tax revenue to the local and national government. Nonetheless, both 798 and Songzhuang face problems which reflect the conflict between artists’ attachment to fringe areas and the government’s urbanization approach. 798 can hardly be called an artist production village now due to the local government’s determination to exploit cultural tourism. Over 50 percent of enterprises and people working in 798 now identify 798 as a tourism area rather than an art or “creative” cluster (Liu). Heavy commercialization has greatly disappointed many leading artists. The price for renting space has gone beyond the affordability of artists, and many have chosen to leave. In Songzhuang, the story is similar. In addition to rising prices, a legal dispute between artists and local residents regarding land property rights in 2008 drove some artists out of Songzhuang because they didn’t feel it was stable anymore (Smith). The district’s future as a centre of original art runs up against the aspirations of local officials for more tax revenue and tourist dollars. In the Songzhuang Cultural Creative Industries Cluster Design Plan (cited in Yang), which was developed by J.A.O Design International Architects and Planners Limited and sponsored by the Songzhuang local government in 2007, Songzhuang is designed as an “arts capital incorporated with culture, commerce and tourism.” The down side of this aspiration is that more museums, galleries, shopping centres, hotels, and recreation infrastructure will inevitably be developed in order to capitalise on Songzhuang’s global reputation. Concluding Reflections In reflecting on the recent history of artist villages in Beijing, we might conclude that rural locations are not only a cheap place for artists to live but also a space to showcase their works. More importantly, the relation of artists and outlying district has evolved into a symbiotic relationship. They interact and grow together. The existence of artists transforms the locale and the locale in turn reinforces the identity of artists. In Yuanmingyuan the artists appreciated the old “recluse” tradition and therefore sought spiritual liberation after decades of suppression. The outlying location symbolized freedom to them and provided distance from the world of noisy interaction. But isolation of artists from the local community and the associated constant conflict with local villagers deepened estrangement; these events brought about the end of the dream. In contrast, at 798 and Songzhuang, artists not only regarded the place as their worksite but also engaged with the local community. They communicated with local people and co-developed projects to transform the local landscape. Local communities changed; they started to learn about the artistic world while gaining economic benefits in many ways, such as house renting, running small grocery stores, providing art supplies and even modelling. Their participation into the “art worlds” (Becker) contributed to a changing cultural environment, in turn strengthening the brand of these artist villages. In many regards there were positive externalities for both artists and the district, although as I mentioned in relation to Songzhuang, tensions about land use have never completely been resolved. Today, the fine arts in China have gone far beyond the traditional modes of classics, aesthetics, liberation or rebellion. Art is also a business which requires the access to the material world in order to produce incomes and make profits. It appears that many contemporary artists are not part of a movement of rebellion (except several artists, such as Ai Weiwei), adopting the pure spirit of art as their life-time mission, as in the Yuanmingyuan artist village. They still long for recognition, but they are also concerned with success and producing a livelihood. The boundary between inner urban and outer urban areas is not as significant to them as it once was for artists from a former period. While many artists enjoy the quiet and space of the fringe and rural areas to work; they also require urban space to exhibit their works and earn money. This factor explains the recent emergence of Caochangdi and other artist villages in the neighbouring area around the 798. These latest artist villages in the urban fringe still have open and peaceful spaces and can be accessed easily due to convenient transportation. Unfortunately, the coalition of business and government leads to rapid commercialization of place which is not aligned with the basic need of artists, which is not only a free or affordable place but also a space for creativity. As mentioned above, 798 is now so commercialized that it is too crowded and expensive for artists due to the government’s overdevelopment; whereas the government’s original intention was to facilitate the development of 798. Furthermore, although artists are a key stakeholder in the government’s agenda for visual art industry, it is always the government’s call when artists’ attachment to rural space comes into conflict with Beijing government’s urbanization plan. Hence the government decides which artist villages should be sacrificed to give way to urban development and which direction the reserved artist villages or art clusters should be developed. The logic of government policy causes an absolute distinction between cities and outlying districts. And the government’s enthusiasm for “urbanization” leads to urbanized artist villages, such as the 798. A vicious circle is formed: the government continuously attempts to have selected artist villages commercialized and transformed into urbanized or quasi-urbanized area and closes other artist villages. One of the outcomes of this policy is that in the government created creative clusters, many artists do not stay, and move away into rural and outlying areas because they prefer to work in non-urban spaces. To resolve this dilemma, greater attention is required to understand artists needs and ways to combine urban convenience and rural tranquillity into their development plans. This may be a bridge too far, however. Reference Becker, Howard Saul. Art Worlds. 25th anniversary, updated and expanded ed. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2008. Collis, Christy, Emma Felton, and Phil Graham. "Beyond the Inner City: Real and Imagined Places in Creative Place Policy and Practice." The Information Society: An International Journal 26.2 (2010): 104–12. Commission, Outer London. The Mayor's Outer London Commission: Report. London: Great London Authority, 2010. Drake, Graham. "'This Place Gives Me Space': Place and Creativity in the Creative Industries." Geoforum 34.4 (2003): 511–24. Florida, Richard. "Cities and the Creative Class." The Urban Sociology Reader. Eds. Jan Lin and Christopher Mele. London: Routledge, 2005. 290–301. ———. The Rise of the Creative Class. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Gibson, Chris, and Chris Brennan-Horley. "Goodbye Pram City: Beyond Inner/Outer Zone Binaries in Creative City Research." Urban Policy and Research 24.4 (2006): 455–71. Jacobs, Jane. The Economy of Cities. New York: Random House, 1969. Keane, Michael. "The Capital Complex: Beijing's New Creative Clusters." Creative Economies, Creative Cities: Asian-European Perspectives. Ed. Lily Kong and Justin O'Connor. London: Springer, 2009. 77–95. Kotkin, Joel. "The Protean Future of American Cities." New Geographer 7 Mar. 2011. 27 Mar. 2011 ‹http://blogs.forbes.com/joelkotkin/2011/03/07/the-protean-future-of-american-cities/›. Landry, Charles. The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators. London: Earthscan Publications, 2000. Leadbeater, Charles, and Kate Oakley. The Independents: Britain's New Cultural Entrepreneurs. London: Demos, 1999. Liu, Mingliang. "Beijing 798 Art Zone: Field Study and Follow-Up Study in the Context of Market." Chinese National Academy of Arts, 2010. Lorenzen, Mark, and Lars Frederiksen. "Why Do Cultural Industries Cluster? Localization, Urbanization, Products and Projects." Creative Cities, Cultural Clusters and Local Economic Development. Ed. Philip Cooke and Luciana Lazzeretti. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2008. 155-79. Mars, Neville, and Adrian Hornsby. The Chinese Dream: A Society under Construction. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2008. Montgomery, John. The New Wealth of Cities: City Dynamics and the Fifth Wave. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Smith, Karen. "Heart of the Art." Beijing: Portrait of a City. Ed. Alexandra Pearson and Lucy Cavender. Hong Kong: The Middle Kingdom Bookworm, 2008. 106–19. Yang, Wei, ed. Songzhuang Arts 2006. Beijing: Hunan Fine Arts Press, 2007. Zhu, Jianfei. Chinese Spatial Strategies Imperial Beijing, 1420-1911. Routledge Curzon, 2004. Zukin, Sharon. The Cultures of Cities. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995. [1] Most prestigious Chinese universities are located in the Haidian District of Beijing, such as Peking University, Tsinghua University, etc. [2] Seven Star Group is the landholder of the area where 798 is based.

As a mode of open access public self-expression, blogs are one form of the unfolding massification of culture (Lovink). Though widely varied in content and style, they are characterised by a reverse chronological diary-like format, often produced by a single author, and often intimately expressive of that author’s thoughts and experiences. The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of blogs as a space for the detailed and on-going expression of the day to day experiences of sufferers of serious illness. We might traditionally consider the experience of illness as absolutely private, but illness, along with the process of recovery, retains a social and cultural aspect (Kleinman et al). A growing body of literature has recognised that the Internet has become a significant space for the recovery work that accompanies the diagnosis of serious illness (Orgad; Pitts; Hardey). Empowerment and agency are often emphasised in this literature, particularly in terms of the increased access to information and support groups, but also in the dynamic performances of self enabled by different forms of online communication and Web production. I am particularly interested in the ongoing shifts in the accessibility of “private” personal experience enabled by blog culture. Although there are thousands of others like them, three “illness blogs” have recently caught my attention for their candidness, completeness and complexity, expressing in vivid depth and detail individual lives transformed by serious illness. The late US journalist and television producer Leroy Sievers maintained a high profile blog, My Cancer, and weekly podcast on the National Public Radio website until his death from metastasised colon cancer in August 2008. Sievers used his public profile and the infrastructure of the NPR website to both detail his personal experience and bring together a community of people also affected by cancer or moved by his thoughts and experiences. The blogger Brainhell came to my attention through blogsphere comments and tributes when he died in February 2008. Spanning more than four years, Brainhell’s witty and charming blog attracted a significant audience and numerous comments, particularly toward the end of his life as the signs of his deteriorating motor system as a result of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS, or “Lou Gherig’s disease”) riddled his intimate posts. Another blog of interest to me here, called Humanities Researcher, incorporates academic Stephanie Trigg’s period of illness and recovery from breast cancer within a pre-existing and ongoing blog about the intersection between professional and personal life. As I had crossed paths with Trigg while at Melbourne University, I was always interested in her blog. But her diagnosis with breast cancer and subsequent accounts of tests, the pain and debilitation of treatment and recovery within her blog also offer valuable insight into the role of online technologies in affecting experiences of illness and for the process of recovery.The subject matter of illness blogs revolves around significant personal transformations as a result of serious illness or trauma: transformations of everyday life, of body and emotional states, relationships, physical appearance, and the loss or recovery of physical ability. It is not my intention in this brief analysis to overgeneralise on the basis of some relatively limited observations. However, many blogs written in response to illness stand out for what they reveal about the shifting location or locatability of self, experience and the events of ongoing illness and thus how we can conceptualise the inherent “privacy” of illness as personal experience. Self-expression here is encompassing of the possibilities through which illness can be experienced – not as representation of that experience, a performance of a disembodied self (though these notions have their merits) – but an expressive element of the substance of the illness as it is experienced over time, as it affects the bodies, thoughts, events and relationships of individuals moving toward a state of full recovery or untimely death. Locating Oneself OnlineMany authors currently examining the role of online spaces in the lives of sufferers of serious illness see online communication as providing a means for configuring experience as a meaningful and coherent story, and thus conferring, or we could say recovering, a sense of agency amidst a tumultuous and ongoing battle with serious illness (Orgad, Pitts). In her study of breast cancer discussion forums, message boards and websites, Orgad (4) notes their role in regaining “the fundamentals disturbed by cancer” (see also Bury). Well before the emergence of online spaces, the act or writing has been seen as “a crucial affirmation of living, a statement against fearfulness, invisibility and silence” (Orgad, 67; Lorde, 61). For many decades scientists have asserted that “brief structured writing sessions can significantly improve mental and physical health for some groups of people” (Singer and Singer 485). The Internet has provided an infrastructure for bringing personal experiences of illness into the public realm, enabling a new level of visibility. Much of the work on illness and the Internet focuses on the liberatory and empowering act of story telling and “disembodied” self-expression. Discussion forums and cancer websites enable the formation of patient led “discourse communities” (Wuthnow). Online spaces such as discussion forums help their participants gain a foothold within a world they share with other sufferers, building communities of practice (Wegner) around specific forms of illness. In this way, these forms of self-expression and communication enable the sufferer of serious illness to counter the modes by which they are made “subjects”, in the Foucauldian sense, of medical discourse. All illness narratives are defined and constructed socially, and are infused with relations of power (Sontag; Foucault, Birth of the Clinic). Forms of online communication have shifted productive practice from professions to patients. Blogs, like discussion forums, websites, email lists etc., have come to play a central role in this contemporary shift. When Lovink (6) describes blogs as a “technology of the self” he points to their role in “self-fashioning”. Blogs written about and in the context of personal illness are a perfect example of this inclination to speak the truth of oneself in the confessional mode of modern culture borne of the church, science and talkshow television. For Foucault (Technologies of the Self, 17), technologies of the self: Permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, immortality. Likewise, as a central concept for understanding Internet identity, the notion of performance (eg, Turkle) highlights the creativity with which illness bloggers may present their role as cancer patient in online spaces, perhaps as an act of resistance to “subjectifying” medical discourses and practices. Many bloggers wrest semiotic power through regular discussion of the language of pathology and medical knowledge, treatment processes and drugs. In the early stages of her treatment, Trigg plays with the new vocabulary, searching for etiologies and making her own semantic connections: I’ve learnt two new words. “Spiculated” describes the characteristic shape of a carcinoma on an ultrasound or x-ray. …The other word is at the other end of the spectrum of linguistic beauty: “lumpectomy”. It took me quite a while to realise that this was not really any different from partial mastectomy; or local excision. It’s an example of the powerful semantic connotations of words to realise that these phrases name the same processes: a long cut, and then the extraction of the diseased tissue (Humanities Researcher, 14 Oct. 2006).Partly due to the rarity of his illness, Brainhell goes through weeks of waiting for a diagnosis, and posts prolifically in an attempt to test out self-diagnoses. Amidst many serious and humorous posts analysing test results and discussing possible diagnoses Brainhell reflects on his targeted use of the blog: I am a word person. I think in sentences. I often take complex technical problems at work and describe them to myself in words. A story helps me understand things better. This blog has become a tool for me to organize my own thoughts about the Mystery Condition. (Brainhell, 6 Jan. 2004)The emancipatory potential of blog writing, however, can be easily overstated. While it is valuable to note and celebrate the performative potential of online production, and its “transformative” role as a technology of the self, it is easy to fall back on an unproblematic distinction between the actual and the virtual, the experience of illness, and its representation in online spaces. Textual expression should always refer us to the extra-textual practices that encompass it without imposing an artificial hierarchy of online and offline, actual experience and representation. As with other forms of online communication and production, the blog culture that has emerged around forms of serious illness plays a significant role in transforming our concepts of the relationship between online and offline spaces. In his My Cancer blog, Sievers often refers to “Cancer World”. He notes, for example, the many “passing friends” he makes in Cancer World through the medical staff and other regular patients at the radiation clinic, and refers to the equipment that sustains his life as the accoutrements of this world. His blog posts revolved around an articulation of the intricacies of this “world” that is in some ways a means of making sense of that world, but is also expressive of it. Sievers tries to explain the notion of Cancer World as a transformation of status between insider & outsider: “once we cross over into Cancer World, we become strangers in a strange land. What to expect, what to hope for, what to fear – none of those are clear right now” (My Cancer, 30 June 2008). Part of his struggle with the illness is also with the expression of himself as encompassed by this new “world” of the effects and activities of cancer. In a similar way, in her Humanities Researcher blog Trigg describes in beautiful detail the processes, routines and relationships formed during radiation treatment. I see these accounts of the textures of cancer spaces as lying at the point of juncture between expression and experience, not as a disembodied, emancipatory realm free from the fetters of illness and the everyday “real” self, but always encompassed by, and encompassing them, and in this way shifting what might be understood to remain “private” in personal experience and self-expression. Blogs as Public Diary Axel Bruns (171), following Matthew Rothenberg, characterises blogs as an accessible technological extension of the personal home page, gaining popularity in the late 1990s because they provided more easy to use templates and web publishing tools than earlier webpage applications. Personalised self expression is a defining element. However, the temporal quality of the reverse chronological, timestamped entry is equally significant for Bruns (171). Taking a broader focus to Bruns, who is most interested in the potential democratisation of media in news related blogs, Lovink sees the experimentation with a “public diary” format as fundamental, signalling their “productive contradiction between public and private” (Lovink 6). A diary may be written for posterity but it is primarily a secretive mode of communication. While blogs may mirror the temporal form of a diary, their intimate focus on self-expression of experience, thoughts and feelings, they do so in a very different communicative context.Despite research suggesting that a majority of bloggers report that they post primarily “for themselves” (Lenhart and Fox) – meaning that they do not deliberately seek a broad audience or readership – the step of making experiences and thoughts so widely accessible cannot be overlooked in any account of blogging. The question of audience or readership, for example, concerns Trigg in her Humanities Researcher blog: The immediacy of a blog distinguishes it from a journal or diary. I wrote for myself, of course, but also for a readership I could measure and chart and hear from, sometimes within minutes of posting. Mostly I don’t know who my readers are, but the kindness and friendship that come to me through the blog gave me courage to write about the intimacies of my treatment; and to chart the emotional upheaval it produced. (Trigg)In their ability to produce a comprehensive expression of the events, experiences, thoughts and feelings of an individual, blogs differ to other forms of online communication such as discussion forums or email lists. Illness blogs are perhaps an extreme example, an open mode of self-expression often arising abruptly in reaction to a life transforming diagnosis and tracking the process of recovery or deterioration, usually ending with remission or death. Brainhell’s blog begins with MRI results, and a series of posts about medical examination and self-examination regarding his mystery condition: So the MRI shows there is something on my brain that is not supposed to be there. The doctor thinks it is not a tumor. That would be good news. …As long as you are alive and have someone to complain to, you ain’t bad off. I am alive and I am complaining about a mystery spot on my brain, and lazy limbs. (Brainhell, 24 Dec. 2003)Brainhell spent many weeks documenting his search for a diagnosis, and continued writing up to his final deterioration and death in 2008. His final posts convey his physical deterioration in truncated sentences, spelling errors and mangled words. In one post he expresses his inability to wake his caregiver and to communicate his distress and physical discomfort at having to pee: when he snorted on waking, i shrieked and he got me up. splayed uncomfortably in the wc as he put dry clothes on me, i was gifted with his words: “you choose this, not me. you want to make it hard, what can i do?” (Brainhell, 13 Jan. 2008). The temporal and continuous format of the blog traverses the visceral, corporeal transformations of body and thought over time. The diary format goes beyond a straightforward narrative form in being far more experiential and even experimental in its self-reflective expression of the events of daily life, thoughts, feelings and states of being. Its public format bears directly on its role in shaping the communicative context in which that expression takes place, and thus to an extent shapes the experience of the illness itself. Nowhere does the expressive substance of the blog so fully encompass the possibilities through which the illness could be experienced than in the author’s death. At this point the blog feels like it is more than a catalogue, dialogue or self-presentation of a struggle with illness. It may take on the form of a memorial (see for example Tom’s Road to Recovery) – a recovery of the self expressed in the daily physical demise, through data maintained in the memory of servers. Ultimately the blog stands as a complex trace of the life lived within its posts. Brainhell’s lengthy blog exemplifies this quite hauntingly. Revealing the Private in Public Blogs exemplify a further step in the transformation of notions of public and private brought about by information and screen technologies. McQuire (103) refers to contemporary screen and Internet culture as “a social setting in which personal identity is subject to new exigencies”. Reality television, such as Big Brother, has promoted “a new mode for the public viewing of private life” (McQuire 114) contributing to the normalisation of open access to personal, intimate revelations, actions and experiences. However, privacy is “an elusive concept” that relates as much to information and property as to self-expression and personal experience (McCullagh). That is, what we consider private to an individual is itself constituted by our variable categories of personal information, material or immaterial possessions, or what counts as an expression of personal experience. Some analysts of online storytelling in the context of illness recognise the unsustainability of the distinction between public and private, but nonetheless rely on the notion of a continuum upon which activities or events could be considered as experienced in a public or private space (Orgad, 129-133). One of the characteristics of a blog, unlike other forms of online communication such as chat, discussion forums and email, is its predominantly public and openly accessible form. Though many illness bloggers do not seem to seek anonymity or hold back in allowing massive access to their self-expression and personal experience, a tension always seems to be there in the background. Identification through the proper name simply implies potential broader effects of blog writing, a pairing of the personal expressions with the person who expresses them in broader daily interactions and relationships. As already “public” figures, Stephanie Trigg and Leroy Sievers choose to forego anonymity, while Brainhell adopted his alias from the beginning and guarded his anonymity carefully. Each of these bloggers, however, shows signs of grappling with the public character of their site, and the interaction between the blog and their everyday life and relationships. In his etiquette page, Brainhell seems unclear about his readership, noting that his blog is for “friends and soul-mates, and complete strangers too”, but that he has not shared it with his family or all of his friends. He goes on to say: You may not have been invited but you are still welcome here. I made it public so that anyone could read it. Total strangers are welcome. Invited friends are welcome. But of those invited friends, I ask you to ask me before you out me as the blog author, or share the blog with other people who already know me. (Brainhell, 18 Feb. 2004) After his death Ratty took steps to continue to maintain his anonymity, vetting many comments and deleting others to “honor BH’s wishes as he outline in ‘Ettiquett for This Blog”’ (Brainhell, 2 Feb. 2008). In Leroy Sievers’ blog, one post exploring the conflict raised by publicly “sharing” his experiences provoked an interesting discussion. He relays a comment sent to him by a woman named Cherie: I have stage four colorectal cancer with liver mets. This is a strange journey, one I am not entirely sure I can share with my loved ones. I am scared it might rob them of the hope I see in their eyes. The hope which I sometimes don’t believe in. (My Cancer, 26 July 2006) Sievers struggles with this question: “How do you balance the need to talk about what is happening to you with the tears of a close friend when you tell him or her the truth? There’s no simple answer.” The blog, in this sense, seems to offer a more legitimate space for the ongoing, detailed expression of these difficult and affective, and traditionally private experiences. In some posts the privacy of the body and bodily experiences is directly challenged or re-negotiated. Stephanie Trigg was concerned with the effect of the blog on her interactions with colleagues. But another interesting dilemma presents itself to her when she is describing the physical effects of cancer, surgery and radiation treatment on her breast, and forces herself to hold back from comparing with the healthy breast: “it's not a medical breast, so I can't write about it here” (Humanities Researcher, 10 Jan. 2007). One prostate cancer blogger, identified as rdavisjr, seems to have no difficulties expressing the details of a physical intrusion on his “privacy” in the far more open forum of his blog: The pull-around ceiling mounted screen was missing (laundry?), so Kelly was called into the room and told to make a screen with a bed sheet. So here I am with one woman sticking her finger up my ass, while another woman is standing in front of the door holding an outstretched bed sheet under her chin (guess she wanted a view!)The screen was necessary to ensure my privacy in the event someone accidentally came into the room, something they said was a common thing. Well, Kelly peering over that sheet was hardly one of my more private moments in life! (Prostate Cancer Journal, 23 Feb. 2001). ConclusionWhatever emancipatory benefits may be found in expressing the most intimate of experiences and events of a serious illness online, it is the creative act of the blog as self-expression here, in its visceral, comprehensive, continuous timestamped format that dismantles the sense of privacy in the name of recovery. The blog is not the public face of private personal experience, but expressive of the life encompassed by that illness, and encompassing its author’s ongoing personal transformation. The blogs discussed here are not alone in demonstrating these practices. The blog format itself may soon evolve or disappear. Nonetheless, the massification enabled by Internet technologies and applications will continue to transform the ways in which personal experience may be considered private. ReferencesBruns, Axel. Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production. New York: Peter Lang, 2005.Bury, Michael. “Chronic Illness as Biographical Disruption.” Sociology of Health and Illness, 4.2 (1982): 167-182.Foucault, Michel. Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Trans. A.M. Sheridan. London: Tavistock, 1973.———. “Technologies of the Self” Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, Patrick M. Hutton, 1988: 16-49. Hardey, Michael. “‘The Story of My Illness’: Personal Accounts of Illness on the Internet.” Health 6.1 (2002): 31-46Kleinman, Arthur, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock, eds. Social Suffering. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Lenhart, Amanda, and Susannah Fox. Bloggers: A Portrait of the Internet’s New Storytellers. Washington: PEW Internet and American Life Project, 2006. Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journals. San Francisco: Spinsters Ink, 1980.Lovink, Geert. Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture. London: Routledge, 2008. McCullagh, Karen. “Blogging: Self Presentation and Privacy.” Information and Communications Technology Law 17.1 (2008): 3-23. McQuire, Scott. “From Glass Architecture to Big Brother: Scenes from a Cultural History of Transparency.” Cultural Studies Review 9.1 (2003): 103-123.Orgad, Shani. Storytelling Online: Talking Breast Cancer on the Internet. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. Pitts, Victoria. “Illness and Internet Empowerment: Writing and Reading Breast Cancer in Cyberspace.” Health 8.1 (2004): 33-59.Rothenberg, Matthew. “Weblogs, Metadata, and the Semantic Web”, paper presented at the Association of Internet Researchers conference, Toronto, 16 Oct. 2003. ‹http://aoir.org/members/papers42/rothenberg_aoir.pdf›.Singer, Jessica, and George H.S. Singer. “Writing as Physical and Emotional Healing: Findings from Clinical Research.” Handbook of Research on Writing: History, Society, School, Individual, Text. Ed. Charles Bazerman. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2008: 485-498. Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor; And, AIDS and Its Metaphors. London: Penguin, 1991. Trigg, Stephanie. “Life Lessons.” Sunday Age, 10 June 2007. Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995. Wenger, Etienne. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Wuthnow, Robert. Communities of Discourse: Ideology and Social Structure in the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and European Socialism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.BlogsBrainhell. ‹http://brainhell.blogspot.com/›. rdavisjr. Prostate Cancer Journal. ‹http://pcjournal-rrd.blogspot.com/›. Sievers, Leroy. My Cancer. ‹http://www.npr.org/blogs/mycancer/›. Tom’s Road to Recovery. ‹http://tomsrecovery.blog.com/›. Trigg, Stephanie. Humanities Researcher. ‹http://stephanietrigg.blogspot.com/›.

Introduction It used to be the case that for the mass of workers, work was something that was done in order to get by. A working class was simply the sum total of all those workers and their dependents whose wages paid for the necessities of life, providing the bare minimum for family reproduction, to secure a place and a lineage within the social order. However, work has now become something else. Work has become the privileged sign of a new kind of class, whose existence is guaranteed not so much by work, but by the very fact of holding a job. Society no longer divides itself between a ruling elite and a subordinated working class, but between a job-holding, job-aspiring class, and those excluded from holding a job; those unable, by virtue of age, infirmity, education, gender, race or demographics, to participate in the rewards of work. Today, these rewards are not only a regular salary and job satisfaction (the traditional consolations of the working class), but also a certain capacity to plan ahead, to gain control of one's destiny through saving and investment, and to enjoy the pleasures of consumption through the fulfilment of self-images. What has happened to transform the worker from a subsistence labourer to an affluent consumer? In what way has the old working class now become part of the consumer society, once the privileged domain of the rich? And what effects has this transformation had on capitalism and its desire for profit? These questions take on an immediacy when we consider that, in the recent Federal election held in Australia (November 11, 2001), voters in the traditional working class areas of western Sydney deserted the Labour Party (the party of the worker) and instead voted Liberal/conservative (the party of capital and small business). The fibro worker cottage valleys of Parramatta are apparently no more, replaced by the gentrified mansions of an aspiring worker formation, in pursuit of the wealth and independence once the privilege of the educated bourgeoisie. In this brief essay, I will outline an understanding of work in terms of its changing relation to capital. My aim is to show how the terrain of work has shifted so that it no longer operates in strict subordination to capital, and has instead become an investment in capital. The worker no longer works to subsist, but does so as an investment in the future. My argument is situated in the rich theoretical field set out by Karl Marx in his critique of capitalism, which described the labour/capital relation in terms of a repressive, extractive force (the power of capital over labour) and which has since been redefined by various poststructuralist theorists including Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze (Anti-Oedipus) in terms of the forces of productive desire. What follows then, is not a Marxist reading of work, but a reading of the way Marx sets forth work in relation to capital, and how this can be re-read through poststructuralism, in terms of the transformation of work from subordination to capital, to investment in capital; from work as the consequence of repression, to work as the fulfilment of desire. The Discipline of Work In his major work Capital Marx sets out a theory of labour in which the task of the worker is to produce surplus value: "Capitalist production is not merely the production of commodities, it is, by its very essence, the production of surplus-value. The worker produces not for himself, but for capital. It is no longer sufficient, therefore, for him simply to produce. He must produce surplus-value." (644) For Marx, surplus-value is generated when commodities are sold in the market for a price greater than the price paid to the worker for producing it: "this increment or excess over the original value I call surplus-value" (251). In order to create surplus value, the time spent by the worker in making a commodity must be strictly controlled, so that the worker produces more than required to fulfil his subsistence needs: ". . . since it is just this excess labour that supplies [the capitalist] with the surplus value" (1011). In other words, capital production is created through a separation between labour and capital: "a division between the product of labour and labour itself, between the objective conditions of labour and the subjective labour-power, was . . . the real foundation and the starting point of the process of capital production" (716). As Michael Ryan has argued, this separation was forced , through an allegiance between capital and the state, to guarantee the conditions for capital renewal by controlling the payment of labour in the form of a wage (84). Marx's analysis of industrialised capital in Capital thus outlines the way in which human labour is transformed into a form of surplus value, by the forced extraction of labour time: "the capitalist forces the worker where possible to exceed the normal rate of intensity [of work] and he forces him as best he can to extend the process of labour beyond the time necessary to replace the amount laid out in wages" (987). For Marx, capitalism is not a voluntary system; workers are not free to enter into and out of their relation with capital, since capital itself cannot survive without the constant supply of labour from which to extract surplus value. Needs and wants can only be satisfied within the labour/capital relation which homogenises labour into exchange value in terms of a wage, pegged to subsistence levels: "the capital earmarked for wages . . . belongs to the worker as soon as it has assumed its true shape of the means of subsistence destined to be consumed by him" (984). The "true shape" of wages, and hence the single, univocal truth of the wage labourer, is that he is condemned to subsistence consumption, because his capacity to share in the surplus value extracted from his own labour is circumscribed by the alliance between capital and the state, where wages are fixed and controlled according to wage market regulations. Marx's account of the labour/capital relation is imposing in its description of the dilemma of labour under the power of capital. Capitalism appears as a thermodynamic system fuelled by labour power, where, in order to make the system homogeneous, to produce exchange value, resistance is reduced: "Because it is capital, the automatic mechanism is endowed, in the person of the capitalist, with consciousness and a will. As capital, therefore, it is animated by the drive to reduce to a minimum the resistance offered by man, that obstinate yet elastic natural barrier." (527) In the capitalist system resistance takes the form of a living residue within the system itself, acting as an "elastic natural barrier" to the extractive force of capital. Marx names this living residue "man". In offering resistance, that is, in being subjected to the force of capital, the figure of man persists as the incommensurable presence of a resistive force composed by a refusal to assimilate. (Lyotard 102) This ambivalent position (the place of many truths) which places man within/outside capital, is not fully recognised by Marx at this stage of his analysis. It suggests the presence of an immanent force, coming from the outside, yet already present in the figure of man (man as "offering" resistance). This force, the counter-force operating through man as the residue of labour, is necessarily active in its effects on the system. That is to say, resistance in the system is not resistance to the system, but the resistance which carries the system elsewhere, to another place, to another time. Unlike the force of capital which works on labour to preserve the system, the resistive force figured in man works its way through the system, transforming it as it goes, with the elusive power to refuse. The separation of labour and capital necessary to create the conditions for capitalism to flourish is achieved by the action of a force operating on labour. This force manifests itself in the strict surveillance of work, through supervisory practices: "the capitalist's ability to supervise and enforce discipline is vital" (Marx 986). Marx's formulation of supervision here and elsewhere, assumes a direct power relation between the supervisor and the supervised: a coercive power in the form of 'the person of the capitalist, with consciousness and a will'. Surplus value can only be extracted at the maximum rate when workers are entirely subjected to physical surveillance. As Foucault has shown, surveillance practices in the nineteenth century involved a panoptic principle as a form of surveillance: "Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals get caught up." (202) Power is not power over, but a productive power involving the commingling of forces, in which the resistive force of the body does not oppose, but complies with an authoritative force: "there is not a single moment of life from which one cannot extract forces, providing one knows how to differentiate it and combine it with others" (165). This commingling of dominant and resistive forces is distributive and proliferating, allowing the spread of institutions across social terrains, producing both "docile" and "delinquent" bodies at the same time: "this production of delinquency and its investment by the penal apparatus ..." (285, emphasis added). Foucault allows us to think through the dilemma posed by Marx, where labour appears entirely subject to the power of capital, reducing the worker to subsistence levels of existence. Indeed, Foucault's work allows us to see the figure of man, briefly adumbrated in quote from Marx above as "that obstinate yet elastic natural barrier", but refigured as an active, investing, transformative force, operating within the capitalist system, yet sending it on its way to somewhere else. In Foucauldian terms, self-surveillance takes on a normative function during the nineteenth century, producing a set of disciplinary values around the concepts of duty and respectability (Childers 409). These values were not only imposed from above, through education and the state, but enacted and maintained by the workers themselves, through the myriad threads of social conformity operating in daily life, whereby people made themselves suitable to each other for membership of the imagined community of disciplined worker-citizens. In this case, the wellbeing of workers gravitated to self-awareness and self-improvement, seen for instance in the magazines circulating at the time addressed to a worker readership (e.g. The Penny Magazine published in Britain from 1832-1845; see Sinnema 15). Instead of the satisfaction of needs in subsistence consumption, the worker was possessed by a desire for self-improvement, taking place in his spare time which was in turn, consolidated into the ego-ideal of the bourgeois self as the perfected model of civilised, educated man. Here desire takes the form of a repression (Freud 355), where the resistive force of the worker is channelled into maintaining the separation between labour and capital, and where the worker is encouraged to become a little bourgeois himself. The desire for self-improvement by the worker did not lead to a shift into the capitalist classes, but was satisfied in coming to know one's place, in being satisfied with fulfilling one's duty and in living a respectable life; that is in being individuated with respect to the social domain. Figure 1 - "The British Beehive", George Cruickshank's image of the hierarchy of labour in Victorian England (1840, modified 1867). Each profession is assigned an individualised place in the social order. A time must come however, in the accumulation of surplus-value, in the vast accelerating machine of capitalism, when the separation between labour and capital begins to dissolve. This point is reached when the residue left by capital in extracting surplus value is sufficient for the worker to begin consuming for its own sake, to engage in "unproductive expenditure" (Bataille 117) where desire is released as an active force. At this point, workers begin to abandon the repressive disciplines of duty and respectability, and turn instead to the control mechanisms of self-transformation or the "inventing of a self as if from scratch" (Massumi 18). In advanced capitalism, where the accrued wealth has concentrated not only profit but wages as well (a rise in the "standard of living"), workers cease to behave as subordinated to the system, and through their increased spending power re-enter the system as property owners, shareholders, superannuants and debtees with the capacity to access money held in banks and other financial institutions. As investment guru Peter Drucker has pointed out, the accumulated wealth of worker-owned superannuation or "pension" funds, is the most significant driving force of global capital today (Drucker 76-8). In the superannuation fund, workers' labour is not fully expended in the production of surplus value, but re-enters the system as investment on the workers' behalf, indirectly fuelling their capacity to fulfil desires through a rapidly accelerating circulation of money. As a consequence, new consumer industries begin to emerge based on the management of investment, where money becomes a product, subject to consumer choice. The lifestyles of the old capitalist class, itself a simulacra of aristocracy which it replaced, are now reproduced by the new worker-capitalist, but in ersatz forms, proliferating as the sign of wealth and abundance (copies of palatial homes replace real palaces, look-alike Rolex watches become available at cheap prices, medium priced family sedans take on the look and feel of expensive imports, and so forth). Unable to extract the surplus value necessary to feed this new desire for money from its own workforce (which has, in effect, become the main consumer of wealth), capital moves 'offshore' in search of a new labour pool, and repeats what it did to the labour pools in the older social formations in its relentless quest to maximise surplus value. Work and Control We are now witnessing a second kind of labour taking shape out of the deformations of the disciplinary society, where surplus value is not extracted, but incorporated into the labour force itself (Mules). This takes place when the separation between labour and capital dissolves, releasing quantities of "reserve time" (the time set aside from work in order to consume), which then becomes part of the capitalising process itself. In this case workers become "investors in their own lives (conceived of as capital) concerned with obtaining a profitable behaviour through information (conceived of as a production factor) sold to them." (Alliez and Feher 347). Gilles Deleuze has identified this shift in terms of what he calls a "control society" where the individuation of workers guaranteed by the disciplinary society gives way to a cybernetic modulation of "dividuals" or cypher values regulated according to a code (180). For dividualised workers, the resource incorporated into capital is their own lived time, no longer divided between work and leisure, but entirely "consummated" in capital (Alliez and Fehrer 350). A dividualised worker will thus work in order to produce leisure, and conversely enjoy leisure as a form of work. Here we have what appears to be a complete breakdown of the separation of labour and capital instigated by the disciplinary society; a sweeping away of the grounds on which labour once stood as a mass of individuals, conscious of their rivalry with capital over the spoils of surplus value. Here we have a situation where labour itself has become a form of capital (not just a commodity exchangeable on the market), incorporated into the temporalised body of the worker, contributing to the extraction of its own surplus value. Under the disciplinary society, the body of the worker became subject to panoptic surveillance, where "time and motion" studies enabled a more efficient control of work through the application of mathematical models. In the control society there is no need for this kind of panoptic control, since the embodiment of the panoptic principle, anticipated by Foucault and responsible for the individuation of the subject in disciplinary societies, has itself become a resource for extracting surplus value. In effect, dividualised workers survey themselves, not as a form of self-discipline, but as an investment for capitalisation. Dividuals are not motivated by guilt, conscience, duty or devotion to one's self, but by a transubjective desire for the other, the figure of a self projected into the future, and realised through their own bodily becoming. Unlike individuals who watch themselves as an already constituted self in the shadow of a super-ego, dividuals watch themselves in the image of a becoming-other. We might like to think of dividuals as self-correctors operating in teams and groups (franchises) whose "in-ness" as in-dividuals, is derived not from self-reflection, but from directiveness. Directiveness is the disposition of a habitus to find its way within programs designed to maximise performance across a territory. Following Gregory Bateson, we might say that directiveness is the pathway forged between a map and its territory (Bateson 454). A billiard ball sitting on a billiard table needs to be struck in such a way to simultaneously reduce the risk of a rival scoring from it, and maximise the score available, for instance by potting it into a pocket. The actual trajectory of the ball is governed by a logic of "restraint" (399) which sets up a number of virtual pathways, all but one of which is eliminated when the map (the rules and strategies of the game) is applied to the territory of the billiard table. If surveillance was the modus operandi of the old form of capitalism which required a strict control over labour, then directiveness is the new force of capital which wants to eliminate work in the older sense of the word, and replace it with the self-managed flow of capitalising labour. Marx's labour theory of value has led us, via a detour through Foucault and Deleuze, to the edge of the labour/capital divide, where the figure of man reappears, not as a worker subject to capital, but in some kind of partnership with it. This seems to spell the end of the old form of work, which required a strict delineation between labour and capital, where workers became rivals with capital for a share in surplus value. In the new formation of work, workers are themselves little capitalists, whose labour time is produced through their own investments back into the system. Yet, the worker is also subject to the extraction of her labour time in the necessity to submit to capital through the wage relation. This creates a reflexive snarl, embedded in the worker's own self-image, where work appears as leisure and leisure appears as work, causing labour to drift over capital and vice versa, for capital to drift over labour. This drifting, mobile relation between labour and capital cannot be secured through appeals to older forms of worker awareness (duty, responsibility, attentiveness, self-surveillance) since this would require a repression of the desire for self-transformation, and hence a fatal dampening of the dynamics of the market (anathema to the spirit of capitalism). Rather it can only be directed through control mechanisms involving a kind of forced partnership between capital and labour, where both parties recognise their mutual destinies in being "thrown" into the system. In the end, work remains subsumed under capital, but not in its alienated, disciplinary state. Rather work has become a form of capital itself, one's investment in the future, and hence as valuable now as it was before. It's just a little more difficult to see how it can be protected as a 'right' of the worker, since workers are themselves investors of their own labour, and not right-bearing individuals whose position in society has been fixed by the separation of labour from capital. References Alliez, Eric and Michel Feher. "The Luster of Capital." Zone1/2 (1987): 314-359. Bataille, Georges. 'The Notion of Expenditure'. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, Trans. and Ed. Alan Stoekl. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1985. 116-29. Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine Books, 1972. Childers, Joseph W. "Observation and Representation: Mr. Chadwick Writes the Poor." Victorian Studies37.3 (1994): 405-31. Deleuze, Gilles. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. --. Negotiations, 1972-1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. Drucker, Peter F. Post-Capitalist Society. New York: Harper, 1993. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. Freud, Sigmund. "The Ego and the Id". On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis. The Pelican Freud Library, Vol 11. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984. 339-407. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. Libidinal Economy. Trans. Iain Hamilton Grant,. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993. Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol. I. Trans. Ben Fowkes. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. Massumi, Brian. "Everywhere You Wanted to Be: Introduction to Fear." The Politics of Everyday Fear. Ed. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. 3-37. Mules, Warwick. "A Remarkable Disappearing Act: Immanence and the Creation of Modern Things." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4.4 (2001). 15 Nov. 2001 <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0108/disappear.php>. Ryan, Michael. Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Introduction. Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1982. Sinnema, Peter W. Dynamics of the Printed Page: Representing the Nation in the Illustrated London News. Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 1998. Links http://csf.colorado.edu/psn/marx/Archive/1867-C1/ http://www.media-culture.org.au/0108/Disappear.html http://acnet.pratt.edu/~arch543p/help/Foucault.html http://acnet.pratt.edu/~arch543p/help/Deleuze.html Citation reference for this article MLA Style Mules, Warwick. "That Obstinate Yet Elastic Natural Barrier" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4.5 (2001). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Mules.xml >. Chicago Style Mules, Warwick, "That Obstinate Yet Elastic Natural Barrier" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4, no. 5 (2001), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Mules.xml > ([your date of access]). APA Style Mules, Warwick. (2001) That Obstinate Yet Elastic Natural Barrier. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4(5). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Mules.xml > ([your date of access]).

Conurbation [f. CON- + L. urb- and urbs city + -ation] An aggregation of urban areas. (OED) Beyond the urban, further and lower even than the suburban, lies the con-urban. The conurban: with the urban, partaking of the urbane, lying against but also perhaps pushing against or being contra the urban. Conurbations stretch littorally from Australian cities, along coastlines to other cities, joining cities through the passage of previously outlying rural areas. Joining the dots between cities, towns, and villages. Providing corridors between the city and what lies outside. The conurban is an accretion, an aggregation, a piling up, or superfluity of the city: Greater London, for instance. It is the urban plus, filling the gaps between cities, as Los Angeles oozing urbanity does for the dry, desert areas abutting it (Davis 1990; Soja 1996). I wish to propose that the conurban imaginary is a different space from its suburban counterpart. The suburban has provided a binary opposition to what is not the city, what lies beneath its feet, outside its ken. Yet it is also what is greater than the urban, what exceeds it. In modernism, the city and its denizens define themselves outside what is arrayed around the centre, ringing it in concentric circles. In stark relief to the modernist lines of the skyscraper, contrasting with the central business district, central art galleries and museums, is to be found the masses in the suburbs. The suburban as a maligned yet enabling trope of modernism has been long revalued, in the art of Howard Arkeley, and in photography of suburban Gothic. It comes as no surprise to read a favourable newspaper article on the Liverpool Regional Art Gallery, in Sydney's Western Suburbs, with its exhibition on local chicken empires, Liverpool sheds, or gay and lesbians living on the city fringe. Nor to hear in the third way posturing of Australian Labor Party parliamentarian Mark Latham, the suburbs rhetorically wielded, like a Victa lawn mover, to cut down to size his chardonnay-set inner-city policy adversaries. The politics of suburbia subtends urban revisionism, reformism, revanchism, and recidivism. Yet there is another less exhausted, and perhaps exhaustible, way of playing the urban, of studying the metropolis, of punning on the city's proper name: the con-urban. World cities, as Saskia Sassen has taught us, have peculiar features: the juxtaposition of high finance and high technology alongside subaltern, feminized, informal economy (Sassen 1998). The Australian city proudly declared to be a world city is, of course, Sydney while a long way from the world's largest city by population, it is believed to be the largest in area. A recent newspaper article on Brisbane's real estate boom, drew comparisons with Sydney only to dismiss them, according to one quoted commentator, because as a world city, Sydney was sui generis in Australia, fairly requiring comparison with other world cities. One form of conurbanity, I would suggest, is the desire of other settled areas to be with the world city. Consider in this regard, the fate of Byron Bay a fate which lies very much in the balance. Byron Bay is sign that circulates in the field of the conurban. Craig MacGregor has claimed Byron as the first real urban culture outside an Australian city (MacGregor 1995). Local residents hope to keep the alternative cultural feel of Byron, but to provide it with a more buoyant economic outlook. The traditional pastoral, fishing, and whaling industries are well displaced by niche handicrafts, niche arts and craft, niche food and vegetables, a flourishing mind, body and spirit industry, and a booming film industry. Creative arts and cultural industries are blurring into creative industries. The Byron Bay area at the opening of the twenty-first century is attracting many people fugitive from the city who wish not to drop out exactly; rather to be contra wishes rather to be gently contrary marked as distinct from the city, enjoying a wonderful lifestyle, but able to persist with the civilizing values of an urban culture. The contemporary figure of Byron Bay, if such a hybrid chimera may be represented, wishes for a conurbanity. Citizens relocate from Melbourne, Canberra, and Sydney, seeking an alternative country and coastal lifestyle and, if at all possible, a city job (though without stress) (on internal migration in Australia see Kijas 2002): Hippies and hip rub shoulders as a sleepy town awakes (Still Wild About Byron, (Sydney Morning Herald, 1 January 2002). Forerunners of Byron's conurbanity leave, while others take their place: A sprawling $6.5 million Byron Bay mansion could be the ultimate piece of memorabilia for a wealthy fan of larrikin Australian actor Paul Hogan (Hoges to sell up at Byron Bay, Illawarra Mercury, 14 February 2002). The ABC series Seachange is one key text of conurbanity: Laura Gibson has something of a city job she can ply the tools of her trade as a magistrate while living in an idyllic rural location, a nice spot for a theme park of contemporary Australian manners and nostalgia for community (on Sea Change see Murphy 2002). Conurban designates a desire to have it both ways: cityscape and pastoral mode. Worth noting is that the Byron Shire has its own independent, vibrant media public sphere, as symbolized by the Byron Shire Echo founded in 1986, one of the great newspapers outside a capital city (Martin & Ellis 2002): <http://www.echo.net.au>. Yet the textual repository in city-based media of such exilic narratives is the supplement to the Saturday broadsheet papers. A case in point is journalist Ruth Ostrow, who lives in hills in the Byron Shire, and provides a weekly column in the Saturday Australian newspaper, its style gently evocative of just one degree of separation from a self-parody of New Age mores: Having permanently relocated to the hills behind Byron Bay from Sydney, it's interesting for me to watch friends who come up here on holiday over Christmas… (Ostrow 2002). The Sydney Morning Herald regards Byron Bay as another one of its Northern beaches, conceptually somewhere between Palm Beach and Pearl Beach, or should one say Pearl Bay. The Herald's fascination for Byron Bay real estate is coeval with its obsession with Sydney's rising prices: Byron Bay's hefty price tags haven't deterred beach-lovin' boomers (East Enders, Sydney Morning Herald 17 January 2002). The Australian is not immune from this either, evidence 'Boom Times in Byron', special advertising report, Weekend Australia, Saturday 2 March 2002. And plaudits from The Financial Review confirm it: Prices for seafront spots in the enclave on the NSW north coast are red hot (Smart Property, The Financial Review, 19 January 2002). Wacky North Coast customs are regularly covered by capital city press, the region functioning as a metonym for drugs. This is so with Nimbin especially, with regular coverage of the Nimbin Mardi Grass: Mardi Grass 2001, Nimbin's famous cannabis festival, began, as they say, in high spirits in perfect autumn weather on Saturday (Oh, how they danced a high old time was had by all at the Dope Pickers' Ball, Sydney Morning Herald, 7 May 2001). See too coverage of protests over sniffer dogs in Byron Bay in Easter 2001 showed (Peatling 2001). Byron's agony over its identity attracts wider audiences, as with its quest to differentiate itself from the ordinariness of Ballina as a typical Aussie seaside town (Buttrose 2000). There are national metropolitan audiences for Byron stories, readers who are familiar with the Shire's places and habits: Lismore-reared Emma Tom's 2002 piece on the politics of perving at King's beach north of Byron occasioned quite some debate from readers arguing the toss over whether wanking on the beach was perverse or par for the course: Public masturbation is a funny old thing. On one hand, it's ace that some blokes feel sexually liberated enough to slap the salami any old time… (Tom 2002). Brisbane, of course, has its own designs upon Byron, from across the state border. Brisbane has perhaps the best-known conurbation: its northern reaches bleed into the Sunshine Coast, while its southern ones salute the skyscrapers of Australia's fourth largest city, the Gold Coast (on Gold Coast and hinterland see Griffin 2002). And then the conburbating continues unabated, as settlement stretches across the state divide to the Tweed Coast, with its mimicking of Sanctuary Cove, down to the coastal towns of Ocean Shores, Brunswick Heads, Byron, and through to Ballina. Here another type of infrastructure is key: the road. Once the road has massively overcome the topography of rainforest and mountain, there will be freeway conditions from Byron to Brisbane, accelerating conurbanity. The caf is often the short-hand signifier of the urban, but in Byron Bay, it is film that gives the urban flavour. Byron Bay has its own International Film Festival (held in the near-by boutique town of Bangalow, itself conurban with Byron.), and a new triple screen complex in Byron: Up north, film buffs Geraldine Hilton and Pete Castaldi have been busy. Last month, the pair announced a joint venture with Dendy to build a three-screen cinema in the heart of Byron Bay, scheduled to open mid-2002. Meanwhile, Hilton and Castaldi have been busy organising the second Byron All Screen Celebration Film Festival (BASC), after last year's inaugural event drew 4000 visitors to more than 50 sessions, seminars and workshops. Set in Bangalow (10 minutes from Byron by car, less if you astral travel)… (Cape Crusaders, Sydney Morning Herald, 15 February 2002). The film industry is growing steadily, and claims to be the largest concentration of film-makers outside of an Australian capital city (Henkel 2000 & 2002). With its intimate relationship with the modern city, film in its Byron incarnation from high art to short video, from IMAX to multimedia may be seen as the harbinger of the conurban. If the case of Byron has something further to tell us about the transformation of the urban, we might consider the twenty-first century links between digital communications networks and conurbanity. It might be proposed that telecommunications networks make it very difficult to tell where the city starts and ends; as they interactively disperse information and entertainment formerly associated with the cultural institutions of the metropolis (though this digitization of urbanity is more complex than hyping the virtual suggest; see Graham & Marvin 1996). The bureau comes not just to the 'burbs, but to the backblocks as government offices are closed in country towns, to be replaced by online access. The cinema is distributed across computer networks, with video-on-demand soon to become a reality. Film as a cultural form in the process of being reconceived with broadband culture (Jacka 2001). Global movements of music flow as media through the North Coast, with dance music culture and the doof (Gibson 2002). Culture and identity becomes content for the information age (Castells 1996-1998; Cunningham & Hartley 2001; OECD 1998; Trotter 2001). On e-mail, no-one knows, as the conceit of internet theory goes, where you work or live; the proverbial refashioning of subjectivity by the internet affords a conurbanity all of its own, a city of bits wherever one resides (Mitchell 1995). To render the digital conurban possible, Byron dreams of broadband. In one of those bizarre yet recurring twists of Australian media policy, large Australian cities are replete with broadband infrastructure, even if by 2002 city-dwellers are not rushing to take up the services. Telstra's Foxtel and Optus's Optus Vision raced each other down streets of large Australian cities in the mid-1990s to lay fibre-coaxial cable to provide fast data (broadband) capacity. Cable modems and quick downloading of video, graphics, and large files have been a reality for some years. Now the Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) technology is allowing people in densely populated areas close to their telephone exchanges to also avail themselves of broadband Australia. In rural Australia, broadband has not been delivered to most areas, much to the frustration of the conurbanites. Byron Bay holds an important place in the history of the internet in Australia, because it was there that one of Australia's earliest and most important internet service providers, Pegasus Network, was established in the late 1980s. Yet Pegasus relocated to Brisbane in 1993, because of poor quality telecommunications networks (Peters 1998). As we rethink the urban in the shadow of modernity, we can no longer ignore or recuse ourselves from reflecting upon its para-urban modes. As we deconstruct the urban, showing how the formerly pejorative margins actually define the centre the suburban for instance being more citified than the grand arcades, plazas, piazzas, or malls; we may find that it is the conurban that provides the cultural imaginary for the urban of the present century. Work remains to be done on the specific modalities of the conurban. The conurban has distinct temporal and spatial coordinates: citizens of Sydney fled to Manly earlier in the twentieth century, as they do to Byron at the beginning of the twenty-first. With its resistance to the transnational commercialization and mass culture that Club Med, McDonalds, and tall buildings represent, and with its strict environment planning regulation which produce a litigious reaction (and an editorial rebuke from the Sydney Morning Herald [SMH 2002]), Byron recuperates the counter-cultural as counterpoint to the Gold Coast. Subtle differences may be discerned too between Byron and, say, Nimbin and Maleny (in Queensland), with the two latter communities promoting self-sufficient hippy community infused by new agricultural classes still connected to the city, but pushing the boundaries of conurbanity by more forceful rejection of the urban. Through such mapping we may discover the endless attenuation of the urban in front and beyond our very eyes; the virtual replication and invocation of the urban around the circuits of contemporary communications networks; the refiguring of the urban in popular and elite culture, along littoral lines of flight, further domesticating the country; the road movies of twenty-first century freeways; the perpetuation and worsening of inequality and democracy (Stilwell 1992) through the action of the conurban. Cities without bounds: is the conurban one of the faces of the postmetropolis (Soja 2000), the urban without end, with no possibility for or need of closure? My thinking on Byron Bay, and the Rainbow Region in which it is situated, has been shaped by a number of people with whom I had many conversations during my four years living there in 1998-2001. My friends in the School of Humanities, Media, and Cultural Studies, Southern Cross University, Lismore, provided focus for theorizing our ex-centric place, of whom I owe particular debts of gratitude to Baden Offord (Offord 2002), who commented upon this piece, and Helen Wilson (Wilson 2002). Thanks also to an anonymous referee for helpful comments. References Buttrose, L. (2000). Betray Byron at Your Peril. Sydney Morning Herald 7 September 2000. Castells, M. (1996-98). The Information Age. 3 vols. Blackwell, Oxford. Cunningham, S., & Hartley, J. (2001). Creative Industries from Blue Poles to Fat Pipes. Address to the National Humanities and Social Sciences Summit, National Museum of Canberra. July 2001. Davis, M. (1990). City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. Verso, London. Gibson, C. (2002). Migration, Music and Social Relations on the NSW Far North Coast. Transformations, no. 2. <http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...>. Graham, S., and Marvin, S. (1996). Telecommunications and the City: Electronic Spaces, Urban Places. Routledge, London & New York. Griffin, Graham. (2002). Where Green Turns to Gold: Strip Cultivation and the Gold Coast Hinterland. Transformations, no. 2. <http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...> Henkel, C. (2002). Development of Audiovisual Industries in the Northern Rivers Region of NSW. Master thesis. Queensland University of Technology. . (2000). Imagining the Future: Strategies for the Development of 'Creative Industries' in the Northern Rivers Region of NSW. Northern Rivers Regional Development Board in association with the Northern Rivers Area Consultative Committee, Lismore, NSW. Jacka, M. (2001). Broadband Media in Australia Tales from the Frontier, Australian Film Commission, Sydney. Kijas, J. (2002). A place at the coast: Internal migration and the shift to the coastal-countryside. Transformations, no. 2. <http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...>. MacGregor, Craig. (1995). The Feral Signifier and the North Coast. In The Abundant Culture: Meaning And Significance in Everyday Australia, ed. Donald Horne & Jill Hooten. Allen and Unwin, Sydney. Martin, F., & Ellis, R. (2002). Dropping in, not out: the evolution of the alternative press in Byron Shire 1970-2001. Transformations, no. 2. <http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...>. Mitchell, W.J. (1995). City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. Molnar, Helen. (1998). 'National Convergence or Localism?: Rural and Remote Communications.' Media International Australia 88: 5-9. Moyal, A. (1984). Clear Across Australia: A History of Telecommunications. Thomas Nelson, Melbourne. Murphy, P. (2002). Sea Change: Re-Inventing Rural and Regional Australia. Transformations, no. 2. <http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...>. Offord, B. (2002). Mapping the Rainbow Region: Fields of belonging and sites of confluence. Transformations, no. 2. <http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...>. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). (1998). Content as a New Growth Industry: Working Party for the Information Economy. OECD, Paris. Ostrow, R. (2002). Joyous Days, Childish Ways. The Australian, 9 February. Peatling, S. (2001). Keep Off Our Grass: Byron stirs the pot over sniffer dogs. Sydney Morning Herald. 16 April. <http://www.smh.com.au/news/0104/14/natio...> Peters, I. (1998). Ian Peter's History of the Internet. Lecture at Southern Cross University, Lismore. CD-ROM. Produced by Christina Spurgeon. Faculty of Creative Industries, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane. Productivity Commission. (2000). Broadcasting Inquiry: Final Report, Melbourne, Productivity Commission. Sassen, S. (1998). Globalisation and its Contents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money. New Press, New York. Soja, E. (2000). Postmetropolis: critical studies of cities and regions. Blackwell, Oxford. . (1996). Thirdspace: journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places. Blackwell, Cambridge, Mass. Stilwell, F. (1992). Understanding Cities and Regions: Spatial Political Economy. Pluto Press, Sydney. Sydney Morning Herald (SMH). (2002). Byron Should Fix its own Money Mess. Editorial. 5 April. Tom, E. (2002). Flashing a Problem at Hand. The Weekend Australian, Saturday 12 January. Trotter, R. (2001). Regions, Regionalism and Cultural Development. Culture in Australia: Policies, Publics and Programs. Ed. Tony Bennett and David Carter. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 334-355. Wilson, H., ed. (2002). Fleeing the City. Special Issue of Transformations journal, no. 2. < http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...>. Links http://www.echo.net.au http://www.smh.com.au/news/0104/14/national/national3.html http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformations/journal/issue2/issue.htm Citation reference for this article MLA Style Goggin, Gerard. "Conurban" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.2 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/conurban.php>. Chicago Style Goggin, Gerard, "Conurban" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 2 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/conurban.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Goggin, Gerard. (2002) Conurban. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(2). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/conurban.php> ([your date of access]).

Introduction The accelerometer seems, at first, both advanced and dated, both too complex and not complex enough. It sits in our video game controllers and our smartphones allowing us to move beyond mere button presses into immersive experiences where the motion of the hand is directly translated into the motion on the screen, where our flesh is transformed into the flesh of a superhero. Or at least that was the promise in 2005. Since then, motion control has moved from a promised revitalization of the video game industry to a not-quite-good-enough gimmick that all games use but none use well. Rogers describes the diffusion of innovation, as an invention or technology comes to market, in five phases: First, innovators will take risks with a new invention. Second, early adopters will establish a market and lead opinion. Third, the early majority shows that the product has wide appeal and application. Fourth, the late majority adopt the technology only after their skepticism has been allayed. Finally the laggards adopt the technology only when no other options are present (62). Not every technology makes it through the diffusion, however, and there are many who have never warmed to the accelerometer-controlled video game. Once an innovation has moved into the mainstream, additional waves of innovation may take place, when innovators or early adopters may find new uses for existing technology, and bring these uses into the majority. This is the case with the accelerometer that began as an airbag trigger and today is used for measuring and augmenting human motion, from dance to health (Walter 84). In many ways, gestural control of video games, an augmentation technology, was an interlude in the advancement of motion control. History In the early 1920s, bulky proofs-of-concept were produced that manipulated electrical voltage levels based on the movement of a probe, many related to early pressure or force sensors. The relationships between pressure, force, velocity and acceleration are well understood, but development of a tool that could measure one and infer the others was a many-fronted activity. Each of these individual sensors has its own specific application and many are still in use today, as pressure triggers, reaction devices, or other sensor-based interactivity, such as video games (Latulipe et al. 2995) and dance (Chu et al. 184). Over the years, the probes and devices became smaller and more accurate, and eventually migrated to the semiconductor, allowing the measurement of acceleration to take place within an almost inconsequential form-factor. Today, accelerometer chips are in many consumer devices and athletes wear battery-powered wireless accelerometer bracelets that report their every movement in real-time, a concept unimaginable only 20 years ago. One of the significant initial uses for accelerometers was as a sensor for the deployment of airbags in automobiles (Varat and Husher 1). The sensor was placed in the front bumper, detecting quick changes in speed that would indicate a crash. The system was a significant advance in the safety of automobiles, and followed Rogers’ diffusion through to the point where all new cars have airbags as a standard component. Airbags, and the accelerometers which allow them to function fast enough to save lives, are a ubiquitous, commoditized technology that most people take for granted, and served as the primary motivating factor for the mass-production of silicon-based accelerometer chips. On 14 September 2005, a device was introduced which would fundamentally alter the principal market for accelerometer microchips. The accelerometer was the ADXL335, a small, low-power, 3-Axis device capable of measuring up to 3g (1g is the acceleration due to gravity), and the device that used this accelerometer was the Wii remote, also called the Wiimote. Developed by Nintendo and its holding companies, the Wii remote was to be a defining feature of Nintendo’s 7th-generation video game console, in direct competition with the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3. The Wii remote was so successful that both Microsoft and Sony added motion control to their platforms, in the form of the accelerometer-based “dual shock” controller for the Playstation, and later the Playstation Move controller; as well as an integrated accelerometer in the Xbox 360 controller and the later release of the Microsoft Kinect 3D motion sensing camera. Simultaneously, computer manufacturing companies saw a different, more pedantic use of the accelerometer. The primary storage medium in most computers today is the Hard Disk Drive (HDD), a set of spinning platters of electro-magnetically stored information. Much like a record player, the HDD contains a “head” which sweeps back and forth across the platter, reading and writing data. As computers changed from desktops to laptops, people moved their computers more often, and a problem arose. If the HDD inside a laptop was active when the laptop was moved, the read head might touch the surface of the disk, damaging the HDD and destroying information. Two solutions were implemented: vibration dampening in the manufacturing process, and the use of an accelerometer to detect motion. When the laptop is bumped, or dropped, the hard disk will sense the motion and immediately park the head, saving the disk and the valuable data inside. As a consequence of laptop computers and Wii remotes using accelerometers, the market for these devices began to swing from their use within car airbag systems toward their use in computer systems. And with an accelerometer in every computer, it wasn’t long before clever programmers began to make use of the information coming from the accelerometer for more than just protecting the hard drive. Programs began to appear that would use the accelerometer within a laptop to “lock” it when the user was away, invoking a loud noise like a car alarm to alert passers-by to any potential theft. Other programmers began to use the accelerometer as a gaming input, and this was the beginning of gesture control and the augmentation of human motion. Like laptops, most smartphones and tablets today have accelerometers included among their sensor suite (Brezmes et al. 796). These accelerometers strictly a user-interface tool, allowing the phone to re-orient its interface based on how the user is holding it, and allowing the user to play games and track health information using the phone. Many other consumer electronic devices use accelerometers, such as digital cameras for image stabilization and landscape/portrait orientation. Allowing a device to know its relative orientation and motion provides a wide range of augmentation possibilities. The Language of Measuring Motion When studying accelerometers, their function, and applications, a critical first step is to examine the language used to describe these devices. As the name implies, the accelerometer is a device which measures acceleration, however, our everyday connotation of this term is problematic at best. In colloquial language, we say “accelerate” when we mean “speed up”, but this is, in fact, two connotations removed from the physical property being measured by the device, and we must unwrap these layers of meaning before we can understand what is being measured. Physicists use the term “accelerate” to mean any change in velocity. It is worth reminding ourselves that velocity (to the physicists) is actually a pair of quantities: a speed coupled with a direction. Given this definition, when an object changes velocity (accelerates), it can be changing its speed, its direction, or both. So a car can be said to be accelerating when speeding up, slowing down, or even turning while maintaining a speed. This is why the accelerometer could be used as an airbag sensor in the first place. The airbags should deploy when a car suddenly changes velocity in any direction, including getting faster (due to being hit from behind), getting slower (from a front impact crash) or changing direction (being hit from the side). It is because of this ability to measure changes in velocity that accelerometers have come into common usage for laptop drop sensors and video game motion controllers. But even this understanding of accelerometers is incomplete. Because of the way that accelerometers are constructed, they actually measure “proper acceleration” within the context of a relativistic frame of reference. Discussing general relativity is beyond the scope of this paper, but it is sufficient to describe a relativistic frame of reference as one in which no forces are felt. A familiar example is being in orbit around the planet, when astronauts (and their equipment) float freely in space. A state of “free-fall” is one in which no forces are felt, and this is the only situation in which an accelerometer reads 0 acceleration. Since most of us are not in free-fall most of the time, any accelerometers in devices in normal use do not experience 0 proper acceleration, even when apparently sitting still. This is, of course, because of the force due to gravity. An accelerometer sitting on a table experiences 1g of force from the table, acting against the gravitational acceleration. This non-zero reading for a stationary object is the reason that accelerometers can serve a second (and, today, much more common) use: measuring orientation with respect to gravity. Gravity and Tilt Accelerometers typically measure forces with respect to three linear dimensions, labeled x, y, and z. These three directions orient along the axes of the accelerometer chip itself, with x and y normally orienting along the long faces of the device, and the z direction often pointing through the face of the device. Relative motion within a gravity field can easily be inferred assuming that the only force acting on the device is gravity. In this case, the single force is distributed among the three axes depending on the orientation of the device. This is how personal smartphones and video game controllers are able to use “tilt” control. When held in a natural position, the software extracts the relative value on all three axes and uses that as a reference point. When the user tilts the device, the new direction of the gravitational acceleration is then compared to the reference value and used to infer the tilt. This can be done hundreds of times a second and can be used to control and augment any aspect of the user experience. If, however, gravity is not the only force present, it becomes more difficult to infer orientation. Another common use for accelerometers is to measure physical activity like walking steps. In this case, it is the forces on the accelerometer from each footfall that are interpreted to measure fitness features. Tilt is unreliable in this circumstance because both gravity and the forces from the footfall are measured by the accelerometer, and it is impossible to separate the two forces from a single measurement. Velocity and Position A second common assumption with accelerometers is that since they can measure acceleration (rate of change of velocity), it should be possible to infer the velocity. If the device begins at rest, then any measured acceleration can be interpreted as changes to the velocity in some direction, thus inferring the new velocity. Although this is theoretically possible, real-world factors come in to play which prevent this from being realized. First, the assumption of beginning from a state of rest is not always reasonable. Further, if we don’t know whether the device is moving or not, knowing its acceleration at any moment will not help us to determine it’s new speed or position. The most important real-world problem, however, is that accelerometers typically show small variations even when the object is at rest. This is because of inaccuracies in the way that the accelerometer itself is interpreted. In normal operation, these small changes are ignored, but when trying to infer velocity or position, these little errors will quickly add up to the point where any inferred velocity or position would be unreliable. A common solution to these problems is in the combination of devices. Many new smartphones combine an accelerometer and a gyroscopes (a device which measures changes in rotational inertia) to provide a sensing system known as an IMU (Inertial measurement unit), which makes the readings from each more reliable. In this case, the gyroscope can be used to directly measure tilt (instead of inferring it from gravity) and this tilt information can be subtracted from the accelerometer reading to separate out the motion of the device from the force of gravity. Augmentation Applications in Health, Gaming, and Art Accelerometer-based devices have been used extensively in healthcare (Ward et al. 582), either using the accelerometer within a smartphone worn in the pocket (Yoshioka et al. 502) or using a standalone accelerometer device such as a wristband or shoe tab (Paradiso and Hu 165). In many cases, these devices have been used to measure specific activity such as swimming, gait (Henriksen et al. 288), and muscular activity (Thompson and Bemben 897), as well as general activity for tracking health (Troiano et al. 181), both in children (Stone et al. 136) and the elderly (Davis and Fox 581). These simple measurements are the first step in allowing athletes to modify their performance based on past activity. In the past, athletes would pour over recorded video to analyze and improve their performance, but with accelerometer devices, they can receive feedback in real time and modify their own behaviour based on these measurements. This augmentation is a competitive advantage but could be seen as unfair considering the current non-equal access to computer and electronic technology, i.e. the digital divide (Buente and Robbin 1743). When video games were augmented with motion controls, many assumed that this would have a positive impact on health. Physical activity in children is a common concern (Treuth et al. 1259), and there was a hope that if children had to move to play games, an activity that used to be considered a problem for health could be turned into an opportunity (Mellecker et al. 343). Unfortunately, the impact of children playing motion controlled video games has been less than successful. Although fitness games have been created, it is relatively easy to figure out how to activate controls with the least possible motion, thereby nullifying any potential benefit. One of the most interesting applications of accelerometers, in the context of this paper, is the application to dance-based video games (Brezmes et al. 796). In these systems, participants wear devices originally intended for health tracking in order to increase the sensitivity and control options for dance. This has evolved both from the use of accelerometers for gestural control in video games and for measuring and augmenting sport. Researchers and artists have also recently used accelerometers to augment dance systems in many ways (Latulipe et al. 2995) including combining multiple sensors (Yang et al. 121), as discussed above. Conclusions Although more and more people are using accelerometers in their research and art practice, it is significant that there is a lack of widespread knowledge about how the devices actually work. This can be seen in the many art installations and sports research studies that do not take full advantage of the capabilities of the accelerometer, or infer information or data that is unreliable because of the way that accelerometers behave. This lack of understanding of accelerometers also serves to limit the increased utilization of this powerful device, specifically in the context of augmentation tools. Being able to detect, analyze and interpret the motion of a body part has significant applications in augmentation that are only starting to be realized. The history of accelerometers is interesting and varied, and it is worthwhile, when exploring new ideas for applications of accelerometers, to be fully aware of the previous uses, current trends and technical limitations. It is clear that applications of accelerometers to the measurement of human motion are increasing, and that many new opportunities exist, especially in the application of combinations of sensors and new software techniques. The real novelty, however, will come from researchers and artists using accelerometers and sensors in novel and unusual ways. References Brezmes, Tomas, Juan-Luis Gorricho, and Josep Cotrina. “Activity Recognition from Accelerometer Data on a Mobile Phone.” In Distributed Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Bioinformatics, Soft Computing, and Ambient Assisted Living. Springer, 2009. Buente, Wayne, and Alice Robbin. “Trends in Internet Information Behavior, 2000-2004.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 59.11 (2008).Chu, Narisa N.Y., Chang-Ming Yang, and Chih-Chung Wu. “Game Interface Using Digital Textile Sensors, Accelerometer and Gyroscope.” IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics 58.2 (2012): 184-189. Davis, Mark G., and Kenneth R. Fox. “Physical Activity Patterns Assessed by Accelerometry in Older People.” European Journal of Applied Physiology 100.5 (2007): 581-589.Hagstromer, Maria, Pekka Oja, and Michael Sjostrom. “Physical Activity and Inactivity in an Adult Population Assessed by Accelerometry.” Medical Science and Sports Exercise. 39.9 (2007): 1502-08. Henriksen, Marius, H. Lund, R. Moe-Nilssen, H. Bliddal, and B. Danneskiod-Samsøe. “Test–Retest Reliability of Trunk Accelerometric Gait Analysis.” Gait & Posture 19.3 (2004): 288-297. Latulipe, Celine, David Wilson, Sybil Huskey, Melissa Word, Arthur Carroll, Erin Carroll, Berto Gonzalez, Vikash Singh, Mike Wirth, and Danielle Lottridge. “Exploring the Design Space in Technology-Augmented Dance.” In CHI’10 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2010. Mellecker, Robin R., Lorraine Lanningham-Foster, James A. Levine, and Alison M. McManus. “Energy Intake during Activity Enhanced Video Game Play.” Appetite 55.2 (2010): 343-347. Paradiso, Joseph A., and Eric Hu. “Expressive Footwear for Computer-Augmented Dance Performance.” In First International Symposium on Wearable Computers. IEEE, 1997. Rogers, Everett M. Diffusion of Innovations. New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1962. Stone, Michelle R., Ann V. Rowlands, and Roger G. Eston. "Relationships between Accelerometer-Assessed Physical Activity and Health in Children: Impact of the Activity-Intensity Classification Method" The Free Library 1 Mar. 2009. Thompson, Christian J., and Michael G. Bemben. “Reliability and Comparability of the Accelerometer as a Measure of Muscular Power.” Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise. 31.6 (1999): 897-902.Treuth, Margarita S., Kathryn Schmitz, Diane J. Catellier, Robert G. McMurray, David M. Murray, M. Joao Almeida, Scott Going, James E. Norman, and Russell Pate. “Defining Accelerometer Thresholds for Activity Intensities in Adolescent Girls.” Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise 36.7 (2004):1259-1266Troiano, Richard P., David Berrigan, Kevin W. Dodd, Louise C. Masse, Timothy Tilert, Margaret McDowell, et al. “Physical Activity in the United States Measured by Accelerometer.” Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 40.1 (2008):181-88. Varat, Michael S., and Stein E. Husher. “Vehicle Impact Response Analysis through the Use of Accelerometer Data.” In SAE World Congress, 2000. Walter, Patrick L. “The History of the Accelerometer”. Sound and Vibration (Mar. 1997): 16-22. Ward, Dianne S., Kelly R. Evenson, Amber Vaughn, Anne Brown Rodgers, Richard P. Troiano, et al. “Accelerometer Use in Physical Activity: Best Practices and Research Recommendations.” Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise 37.11 (2005): S582-8. Yang, Chang-Ming, Jwu-Sheng Hu, Ching-Wen Yang, Chih-Chung Wu, and Narisa Chu. “Dancing Game by Digital Textile Sensor, Accelerometer and Gyroscope.” In IEEE International Games Innovation Conference. IEEE, 2011.Yoshioka, M., M. Ayabe, T. Yahiro, H. Higuchi, Y. Higaki, J. St-Amand, H. Miyazaki, Y. Yoshitake, M. Shindo, and H. Tanaka. “Long-Period Accelerometer Monitoring Shows the Role of Physical Activity in Overweight and Obesity.” International Journal of Obesity 29.5 (2005): 502-508.

…love is queered not when we discover it to be resistant to or more than its known forms, but when we see that there is no world that admits how it actually works as a principle of living. Lauren Berlant – “Love, A Queer Feeling” As the sun beats down on a very dusty Musgrave Park, the crowd is hushed in respect for the elder addressing us. It is Pride Fair Day and we are listening to the story of how this place has been a home for queer and black people throughout Brisbane’s history. Like so many others, this park has been a place of refuge in times when Boundary Streets marked the lines aboriginal people couldn’t cross to enter the genteel heart of Brisbane’s commercial district. The street names remain today, and even if movements across territory are somewhat less constrained, a manslaughter trial taking place nearby reminds us of the surveillance aboriginal people still suffer as a result of their refusal to stay off the streets and out of sight in homes they don’t have. In the past few years, Fair Day has grown in size. It now charges an entry fee to fence out unwelcome guests, so that those who normally live here have been effectively uninvited from the party. On this sunny Saturday, we sit and talk about these things, and wonder at the number of spaces still left in this city for spontaneous, non-commercial encounters and alliances. We could hardly have known that in the course of just a few weeks, the distance separating us from others would grow even further. During the course of Brisbane’s month-long Pride celebrations in 2007, two events affected the rights agendas of both queer and black Australians. First, The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Report, Same Sex, Same Entitlements, was tabled in parliament. Second, the Federal government decided to declare a state of emergency in remote indigenous communities in the Northern Territory in response to an inquiry on the state of aboriginal child abuse. (The full title of the report is “Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarle”: Little Children are Sacred, and the words are from the Arrandic languages of the Central Desert Region of the Northern Territory. The report’s front cover also explains the title in relation to traditional law of the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land.) While the latter issue has commanded the most media and intellectual attention, and will be discussed later in this piece, the timing of both reports provides an opportunity to consider the varying experiences of two particularly marginalised groups in contemporary Australia. In a period when the Liberal Party has succeeded in pitting minority claims against one another as various manifestations of “special interests” (Brett, Gregg) this essay suggests there is a case to be made for queer and black activists to join forces against wider tendencies that affect both communities. To do this I draw on the work of American critic, Lauren Berlant, who for many years has offered a unique take on debates about citizenship in the United States. Writing from a queer theory perspective, Berlant argues that the conservative political landscape in her country has succeeded in convincing people that “the intimacy of citizenship is something scarce and sacred, private and proper, and only for members of families” (Berlant Queen 2-3). The consequence of this shift is that politics moves from being a conversation conducted in the public sphere about social issues to instead resemble a form of adjudication on the conduct of others in the sphere of private life. In this way, Berlant indicates how heteronormative culture “uses cruel and mundane strategies both to promote change from non-normative populations and to deny them state, federal, and juridical supports because they are deemed morally incompetent to their own citizenship” (Berlant, Queen 19). In relation to the so-called state of emergency in the Northern Territory, coming so soon after attempts to encourage indigenous home-ownership in the same region, the compulsion to promote change from non-normative populations currently affects indigenous Australians in ways that resonate with Berlant’s argument. While her position reacts to an environment where the moral majority has a much firmer hold on the national political spectrum, in Australia these conservative forces have no need to be so eloquent—normativity is already embedded in a particular form of “ordinariness” that is the commonsense basis for public political debate (Allon, Brett and Moran). These issues take on further significance as home-ownership and aspirations towards it have gradually become synonymous with the demonstration of appropriate citizenship under the Coalition government: here, phrases like “an interest rate election” are assumed to encapsulate voter sentiment while “the mortgage belt” has emerged as the demographic most keenly wooed by precariously placed politicians. As Berlant argues elsewhere, the project of normalization that makes heterosexuality hegemonic also entails “material practices that, though not explicitly sexual, are implicated in the hierarchies of property and propriety” that secure heteronormative privilege (Berlant and Warner 548). Inhabitants of remote indigenous communities in Australia are invited to desire and enact normal homes in order to be accepted and rewarded as valuable members of the nation; meanwhile gay and lesbian couples base their claims for recognition on the adequate manifestation of normal homes. In this situation black and queer activists share an interest in elaborating forms of kinship and community that resist the limited varieties of home-building currently sanctioned and celebrated by the State. As such, I will conclude this essay with a model for this alternative process of home-building in the hope of inspiring others. Home Sweet Home Ever since the declaration of terra nullius, white Australia has had a hard time recognising homes it doesn’t consider normal. To the first settlers, indigenous people’s uncultivated land lacked meaning, their seasonal itinerancy challenged established notions of property, while their communal living and wider kinship relations confused nuclear models of procreative responsibility and ancestry. From the homes white people still call “camps” many aboriginal people were moved against their will on to “missions” which even in name invoked the goal of assimilation into mainstream society. So many years later, white people continue to maintain that their version of homemaking is the most superior, the most economically effective, the most functional, with government policy and media commentators both agreeing that “the way out of indigenous disadvantage is home ownership.”(The 1 July broadcast of the esteemed political chat show Insiders provides a representative example of this consensus view among some of the country’s most respected journalists.) In the past few months, low-interest loans have been touted as the surest route out of the shared “squalor” (Weekend Australian, June 30-July1) of communal living and the right path towards economic development in remote aboriginal communities (Karvelas, “New Deal”). As these references suggest, The Australian newspaper has been at the forefront of reporting these government initiatives in a positive light: one story from late May featured a picture of Tiwi Islander Mavis Kerinaiua watering her garden with the pet dog and sporting a Tigers Aussie Rules singlet. The headline, “Home, sweet home, for Mavis” (Wilson) was a striking example of a happy and contented black woman in her own backyard, especially given how regularly mainstream national news coverage of indigenous issues follows a script of failed aboriginal communities. In stories like these, communal land ownership is painted as the cause of dysfunction, and individual homes are crucial to “changing the culture.” Never is it mentioned that communal living arrangements clearly were functional before white settlement, were an intrinsic part of “the culture”; nor is it acknowledged that the option being offered to indigenous people is land that had already been taken away from them in one way or another. That this same land can be given back only on certain conditions—including financially rewarding those who “prove they are doing well” by cultivating their garden in recognisably right ways (Karvelas, “New Deal”)— bolsters Berlant’s claim that government rhetoric succeeds by transforming wider structural questions into matters of individual responsibility. Home ownership is the stunningly selective neoliberal interpretation of “land rights”. The very notion of private property erases the social and cultural underpinnings of communal living as a viable way of life, stigmatising any alternative forms of belonging that might form the basis for another kind of home. Little Children Are Sacred The latest advance in efforts to encourage greater individual responsibility in indigenous communities highlights child abuse as the pivotal consequence of State and Local government inaction. The innocent indigenous child provides the catalyst for a myriad of competing political positions, the most vocal of which welcomes military intervention on behalf of powerless, voiceless kids trapped in horrendous scenarios (Kervalas, “Pearson’s Passion”). In these representations, the potentially abused aboriginal child takes on “supericonicity” in public debate. In her North American context, Berlant uses this concept to explain how the unborn child figures in acrimonious arguments over abortion. The foetus has become the most mobilising image in the US political scene because: it is an image of an American, perhaps the last living American, not yet bruised by history: not yet caught up in the processes of secularisation and centralisation… This national icon is too innocent of knowledge, agency, and accountability and thus has ethical claims on the adult political agents who write laws, make culture, administer resources, control things. (Berlant, Queen 6) In Australia, the indigenous child takes on supericonicity because he or she is too young to formulate a “black armband” view of history, to have a point of view on why their circumstance happens to be so objectionable, to vote out the government that wants to survey and penetrate his or her body. The child’s very lack of agency is used as justification for the military action taken by those who write laws, make the culture that will be recognized as an appropriate performance of indigeneity, administer (at the same time as they cut) essential resources; those who, for the moment, control things. However, and although a government perspective would not recognize this, in Australia the indigenous child is always already bruised by conventional history in the sense that he or she will have trouble accessing the stories of ancestors and therefore the situation that affects his or her entry into the world. Indeed, it is precisely the extent to which the government denies its institutional culpability in inflicting wounds on aboriginal people throughout history that the indigenous child’s supericonicity is now available as a political weapon. Same-Sex: Same Entitlements A situation in which the desire for home ownership is pedagogically enforced while also being economically sanctioned takes on further dimensions when considered next to the fate of other marginalised groups in society—those for whom an appeal for acceptance and equal rights pivots on the basis of successfully performing normal homes. While indigenous Australians are encouraged to aspire for home ownership as the appropriate manifestation of responsible citizenship, the HREOC report represents a group of citizens who crave recognition for already having developed this same aspiration. In the case studies selected for the Same-Sex: Same Entitlements Report, discrimination against same-sex couples is identified in areas such as work and taxation, workers’ compensation, superannuation, social security, veterans’ entitlements and childrearing. It recommends changes to existing laws in these areas to match those that apply to de facto relationships. When launching the report, the commissioner argued that gay people suffer discrimination “simply because of whom they love”, and the report launch quotes a “self-described ‘average suburban family’” who insist “we don’t want special treatment …we just want equality” (HREOC). Such positioning exercises give some insight into Berlant’s statement that “love is a site that has perhaps not yet been queered enough” (Berlant, “Love” 433). A queer response to the report might highlight that by focussing on legal entitlements of the most material kind, little is done to challenge the wider situation in which one’s sexual relationship has the power to determine intimate possessions and decisions—whether this is buying a plane ticket, getting a loan, retiring in some comfort or finding a nice nursing home. An agenda calling for legislative changes to financial entitlement serves to reiterate rather than challenge the extent to which economically sanctioned subjectivities are tied to sexuality and normative models of home-building. A same-sex rights agenda promoting traditional notions of procreative familial attachment (the concerned parents of gay kids cited in the report, the emphasis on the children of gay couples) suggests that this movement for change relies on a heteronormative model—if this is understood as the manner in which the institutions of personal life remain “the privileged institutions of social reproduction, the accumulation and transfer of capital, and self-development” (Berlant and Warner 553). What happens to those who do not seek the same procreative path? Put another way, the same-sex entitlements discourse can be seen to demand “intelligibility” within the hegemonic understanding of love, when love currently stands as the primordial signifier and ultimate suturing device for all forms of safe, reliable and useful citizenly identity (Berlant, “Love”). In its very terminology, same-sex entitlement asks to access the benefits of normativity without challenging the ideological or economic bases for its attachment to particular living arrangements and rewards. The political agenda for same-sex rights taking shape in the Federal arena appears to have chosen its objectives carefully in order to fit existing notions of proper home building and the economic incentives that come with them. While this is understandable in a conservative political environment, a wider agenda for queer activism in and outside the home would acknowledge that safety, security and belonging are universal desires that stretch beyond material acquisitions, financial concerns and procreative activity (however important these things are). It is to the possibilities this perspective might generate that I now turn. One Size Fits Most Urban space is always a host space. The right to the city extends to those who use the city. It is not limited to property owners. (Berlant and Warner, 563) The affective charge and resonance of a concept like home allows an opportunity to consider the intimacies particular to different groups in society, at the same time as it allows contemplation of the kinds of alliances increasingly required to resist neoliberalism’s impact on personal space. On one level, this might entail publicly denouncing representations of indigenous living conditions that describe them as “squalor” as some kind of hygienic short-hand that comes at the expense of advocating infrastructure suited to the very different way of living that aboriginal kinship relations typically require. Further, as alternative cultural understandings of home face ongoing pressure to fit normative ideals, a key project for contemporary queer activism is to archive, document and publicise the varied ways people choose to live at this point in history in defiance of sanctioned arrangements (eg Gorman-Murray 2007). Rights for gay and lesbian couples and parents need not be called for in the name of equality if to do so means reproducing a logic that feeds the worst stereotypes around non-procreating queers. Such a perspective fares poorly for the many literally unproductive citizens, queer and straight alike, whose treacherous refusal to breed banishes them from the respectable suburban politics to which the current government caters. Which takes me back to the park. Later that afternoon on Fair Day, we’ve been entertained by a range of performers, including the best Tina Turner impersonator I’ll ever see. But the highlight is the festival’s special guest, Vanessa Wagner who decides to end her show with a special ceremony. Taking the role of celebrant, Vanessa invites three men on to the stage who she explains are in an ongoing, committed three-way relationship. Looking a little closer, I remember meeting these blokes at a friend’s party last Christmas Eve: I was the only girl in an apartment full of gay men in the midst of some serious partying (and who could blame them, on the eve of an event that holds dubious relevance for their preferred forms of intimacy and celebration?). The wedding takes place in front of an increasingly boisterous crowd that cannot fail to appreciate the gesture as farcically mocking the sacred bastion of gay activism—same-sex marriage. But clearly, the ceremony plays a role in consecrating the obvious desire these men have for each other, in a safe space that feels something like a home. Their relationship might be a long way from many people’s definition of normal, but it clearly operates with care, love and a will for some kind of longevity. For queer subjects, faced with a history of persecution, shame and an unequal share of a pernicious illness, this most banal of possible definitions of home has been a luxury difficult to afford. Understood in this way, queer experience is hard to compare with that of indigenous people: “The queer world is a space of entrances, exits, unsystematised lines of acquaintance, projected horizons, typifying examples, alternate routes, blockages, incommensurate geographies” (Berlant and Warner 558). In many instances, it has “required the development of kinds of intimacy that bear no necessary relation to domestic space, to kinship, to the couple form, to property, or to the nation” (ibid) in liminal and fleeting zones of improvisation like parties, parks and public toilets. In contrast, indigenous Australians’ distinct lines of ancestry, geography, and story continue through generations of kin in spite of the efforts of a colonising power to reproduce others in its own image. But in this sense, what queer and black Australians now share is the fight to live and love in more than one way, with more than one person: to extend relationships of care beyond the procreative imperative and to include land that is beyond the scope of one’s own backyard. Both indigenous and queer Australians stand to benefit from a shared project “to support forms of affective, erotic and personal living that are public in the sense of accessible, available to memory, and sustained through collective activity” (Berlant and Warner 562). To build this history is to generate an archive that is “not simply a repository” but “is also a theory of cultural relevance” (Halberstam 163). A queer politics of home respects and learns from different ways of organising love, care, affinity and responsibility to a community. This essay has been an attempt to document other ways of living that take place in the pockets of one city, to show that homes often exist where others see empty space, and that love regularly survives beyond the confines of the couple. In learning from the history of oppression experienced in the immediate territories I inhabit, I also hope it captures what it means to reckon with the ongoing knowledge of being an uninvited guest in the home of another culture, one which, through shared activism, will continue to survive much longer than this, or any other archive. References Allon, Fiona. “Home as Cultural Translation: John Howard’s Earlwood.” Communal/Plural 5 (1997): 1-25. Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. ———. “Love, A Queer Feeling.” Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis. Eds. Tim Dean and Christopher Lane. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001. 432-51. ———, and Michael Warner. “Sex in Public.” Critical Inquiry 24.2 (1998): 547-566. Brett, Judith. Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class: From Alfred Deakin to John Howard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ———, and Anthony Moran. Ordinary People’s Politics: Australians Talk About Politics, Life and the Future of Their Country. Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2006. Gorman-Murray, Andrew. “Contesting Domestic Ideals: Queering the Australian Home.” Australian Geographer 38.2 (2007): 195-213. Gregg, Melissa. “The Importance of Being Ordinary.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 10.1 (2007): 95-104. Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York and London: NYU Press, 2005 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>. ———. Launch of Final Report of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s Same-Sex: Same Entitlements Inquiry (transcript). 2007. 5 July 2007 . Insiders. ABC TV. 1 July 2007. 5 July 2007 http://www.abc.net.au/insiders/content/2007/s1966728.htm>. Karvelas, Patricia. “It’s New Deal or Despair: Pearson.” The Weekend Australian 12-13 May 2007: 7. ———. “How Pearson’s Passion Moved Howard to Act.” The Australian. 23 June 2007. 5 July 2007 http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21952951-5013172,00.html>. Northern Territory Government Inquiry Report into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse. Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarle: Little Children Are Sacred. 2007. 5 July 2007 http://www.nt.gov.au/dcm/inquirysaac/pdf/bipacsa_final_report.pdf>. Wilson, Ashleigh. “Home, Sweet Home, for Mavis.” The Weekend Australian 12-13 May 2007: 7. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Gregg, Melissa. "Normal Homes." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/02-gregg.php>. APA Style Gregg, M. (Aug. 2007) "Normal Homes," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/02-gregg.php>.

IntroductionSupermarkets are functionally challenging environments for people with vision impairments. A supermarket is likely to house an average of 45,000 products in a median floor-space of 4,529 square meters and many visually impaired people are unable to shop without assistance, which greatly impedes personal independence (Nicholson et al.). The task of selecting goods in a supermarket is an “activity that is expressive of agency, identity and creativity” (Sutherland) from which many vision-impaired persons are excluded. In response to this, a number of proof of concept (demonstrating feasibility) and prototype assistive technologies are being developed which aim to use smart phones as potential sensorial aides for vision impaired persons. In this paper, I discuss two such prototypic technologies, Shop Talk and BlindShopping. I engage with this issue’s list theme by suggesting that, on the one hand, list making is a uniquely human activity that demonstrates our need for order, reliance on memory, reveals our idiosyncrasies, and provides insights into our private lives (Keaggy 12). On the other hand, lists feature in the creation of spatial inventories that represent physical environments (Perec 3-4, 9-10). The use of lists in the architecture of assistive technologies for shopping illuminates the interaction between these two modalities of list use where items contained in a list are not only textual but also cartographic elements that link the material and immaterial in space and time (Haber 63). I argue that despite the emancipatory potential of assistive shopping technologies, their efficacy in practical situations is highly dependent on the extent to which they can integrate a number of lists to produce representations of space that are meaningful for vision impaired users. I suggest that the extent to which these prototypes may translate to becoming commercially viable, widely adopted technologies is heavily reliant upon commercial and institutional infrastructures, data sources, and regulation. Thus, their design, manufacture and adoption-potential are shaped by the extent to which certain data inventories are accessible and made interoperable. To overcome such constraints, it is important to better understand the “spatial syntax” associated with the shopping task for a vision impaired person; that is, the connected ordering of real and virtual spatial elements that result in a supermarket as a knowable space within which an assisted “spatial practice” of shopping can occur (Kellerman 148, Lefebvre 16).In what follows, I use the concept of lists to discuss the production of supermarket-space in relation to the enabling and disabling potentials of assistive technologies. First, I discuss mobile digital technologies relative to disability and impairment and describe how the shopping task produces a disabling spatial practice. Second, I present a case study showing how assistive technologies function in aiding vision impaired users in completing the task of supermarket shopping. Third, I discuss various factors that may inhibit the liberating potential of technology assisted shopping by vision-impaired people. Addressing Shopping as a Disabling Spatial Practice Consider how a shopping list might inform one’s experience of supermarket space. The way shopping lists are written demonstrate the variability in the logic that governs list writing. As Bill Keaggy demonstrates in his found shopping list Web project and subsequent book, Milk, Eggs, Vodka, a shopping list may be written on a variety of materials, be arranged in a number of orientations, and the writer may use differing textual attributes, such as size or underlining to show emphasis. The writer may use longhand, abbreviate, write neatly, scribble, and use an array of alternate spelling and naming conventions. For example, items may be listed based on knowledge of the location of products, they may be arranged on a list as a result of an inventory of a pantry or fridge, or they may be copied in the order they appear in a recipe. Whilst shopping, some may follow strictly the order of their list, crossing back and forth between aisles. Some may work through their list item-by-item, perhaps forward scanning to achieve greater economies of time and space. As a person shops, their memory may be stimulated by visual cues reminding them of products they need that may not be included on their list. For the vision impaired, this task is near impossible to complete without the assistance of a relative, friend, agency volunteer, or store employee. Such forms of assistance are often unsatisfactory, as delays may be caused due to the unavailability of an assistant, or the assistant having limited literacy, knowledge, or patience to adequately meet the shopper’s needs. Home delivery services, though readily available, impede personal independence (Nicholson et al.). Katie Ellis and Mike Kent argue that “an impairment becomes a disability due to the impact of prevailing ableist social structures” (3). It can be said, then, that supermarkets function as a disability producing space for the vision impaired shopper. For the vision impaired, a supermarket is a “hegemonic modern visual infrastructure” where, for example, merchandisers may reposition items regularly to induce customers to explore areas of the shop that they wouldn’t usually, a move which adds to the difficulty faced by those customers with impaired vision who work on the assumption that items remain as they usually are (Schillmeier 161).In addressing this issue, much emphasis has been placed on the potential of mobile communications technologies in affording vision impaired users greater mobility and flexibility (Jolley 27). However, as Gerard Goggin argues, the adoption of mobile communication technologies has not necessarily “gone hand in hand with new personal and collective possibilities” given the limited access to standard features, even if the device is text-to-speech enabled (98). Issues with Digital Rights Management (DRM) limit the way a device accesses and reproduces information, and confusion over whether audio rights are needed to convert text-to-speech, impede the accessibility of mobile communications technologies for vision impaired users (Ellis and Kent 136). Accessibility and functionality issues like these arise out of the needs, desires, and expectations of the visually impaired as a user group being considered as an afterthought as opposed to a significant factor in the early phases of design and prototyping (Goggin 89). Thus, the development of assistive technologies for the vision impaired has been left to third parties who must adopt their solutions to fit within certain technical parameters. It is valuable to consider what is involved in the task of shopping in order to appreciate the considerations that must be made in the design of shopping intended assistive technologies. Shopping generally consists of five sub-tasks: travelling to the store; finding items in-store; paying for and bagging items at the register; exiting the store and getting home; and, the often overlooked task of putting items away once at home. In this process supermarkets exhibit a “trichotomous spatial ontology” consisting of locomotor space that a shopper moves around the store, haptic space in the immediate vicinity of the shopper, and search space where individual products are located (Nicholson et al.). In completing these tasks, a shopper will constantly be moving through and switching between all three of these spaces. In the next section I examine how assistive technologies function in producing supermarkets as both enabling and disabling spaces for the vision impaired. Assistive Technologies for Vision Impaired ShoppersJason Farman (43) and Adriana de Douza e Silva both argue that in many ways spaces have always acted as information interfaces where data of all types can reside. Global Positioning System (GPS), Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), and Quick Response (QR) codes all allow for practically every spatial encounter to be an encounter with information. Site-specific and location-aware technologies address the desire for meaningful representations of space for use in everyday situations by the vision impaired. Further, the possibility of an “always-on” connection to spatial information via a mobile phone with WiFi or 3G connections transforms spatial experience by “enfolding remote [and latent] contexts inside the present context” (de Souza e Silva). A range of GPS navigation systems adapted for vision-impaired users are currently on the market. Typically, these systems convert GPS information into text-to-speech instructions and are either standalone devices, such as the Trekker Breeze, or they use the compass, accelerometer, and 3G or WiFi functions found on most smart phones, such as Loadstone. Whilst both these products are adequate in guiding a vision-impaired user from their home to a supermarket, there are significant differences in their interfaces and data architectures. Trekker Breeze is a standalone hardware device that produces talking menus, maps, and GPS information. While its navigation functionality relies on a worldwide radio-navigation system that uses a constellation of 24 satellites to triangulate one’s position (May and LaPierre 263-64), its map and text-to-speech functionality relies on data on a DVD provided with the unit. Loadstone is an open source software system for Nokia devices that has been developed within the vision-impaired community. Loadstone is built on GNU General Public License (GPL) software and is developed from private and user based funding; this overcomes the issue of Trekker Breeze’s reliance on trading policies and pricing models of the few global vendors of satellite navigation data. Both products have significant shortcomings if viewed in the broader context of the five sub-tasks involved in shopping described above. Trekker Breeze and Loadstone require that additional devices be connected to it. In the case of Trekker Breeze it is a tactile keypad, and with Loadstone it is an aftermarket screen reader. To function optimally, Trekker Breeze requires that routes be pre-recorded and, according to a review conducted by the American Foundation for the Blind, it requires a 30-minute warm up time to properly orient itself. Both Trekker Breeze and Loadstone allow users to create and share Points of Interest (POI) databases showing the location of various places along a given route. Non-standard or duplicated user generated content in POI databases may, however, have a negative effect on usability (Ellis and Kent 2). Furthermore, GPS-based navigation systems are accurate to approximately ten metres, which means that users must rely on their own mobility skills when they are required to change direction or stop for traffic. This issue with GPS accuracy is more pronounced when a vision-impaired user is approaching a supermarket where they are likely to encounter environmental hazards with greater frequency and both pedestrian and vehicular traffic in greater density. Here the relations between space defined and spaces poorly defined or undefined by the GPS device interact to produce the supermarket surrounds as a disabling space (Galloway). Prototype Systems for Supermarket Navigation and Product SelectionIn the discussion to follow, I look at two prototype systems using QR codes and RFID that are designed to be used in-store by vision-impaired shoppers. Shop Talk is a proof of concept system developed by researchers at Utah State University that uses synthetic verbal route directions to assist vision impaired shoppers with supermarket navigation, product search, and selection (Nicholson et al.). Its hardware consists of a portable computational unit, a numeric keypad, a wireless barcode scanner and base station, headphones for the user to receive the synthetic speech instructions, a USB hub to connect all the components, and a backpack to carry them (with the exception of the barcode scanner) which has been slightly modified with a plastic stabiliser to assist in correct positioning. Shop Talk represents the supermarket environment using two data structures. The first is comprised of two elements: a topological map of locomotor space that allows for directional labels of “left,” “right,” and “forward,” to be added to the supermarket floor plan; and, for navigation of haptic space, the supermarket inventory management system, which is used to create verbal descriptions of product information. The second data structure is a Barcode Connectivity Matrix (BCM), which associates each shelf barcode with several pieces of information such as aisle, aisle side, section, shelf, position, Universal Product Code (UPC) barcode, product description, and price. Nicholson et al. suggest that one of their “most immediate objectives for future work is to migrate the system to a more conventional mobile platform” such as a smart phone (see Mobile Shopping). The Personalisable Interactions with Resources on AMI-Enabled Mobile Dynamic Environments (PRIAmIDE) research group at the University of Deusto is also approaching Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) by exploring the smart phone’s sensing, communication, computing, and storage potential. As part of their work, the prototype system, BlindShopping, was developed to address the issue of assisted shopping using entirely off-the-shelf technology with minimal environmental adjustments to navigate the store and search, browse and select products (López-de-Ipiña et al. 34). Blind Shopping’s architecture is based on three components. Firstly, a navigation system provides the user with synthetic verbal instructions to users via headphones connected to the smart phone device being used in order to guide them around the store. This requires a RFID reader to be attached to the tip of the user’s white cane and road-marking-like RFID tag lines to be distributed throughout the aisles. A smartphone application processes the RFID data that is received by the smart phone via Bluetooth generating the verbal navigation commands as a result. Products are recognised by pointing a QR code reader enabled smart phone at an embossed code located on a shelf. The system is managed by a Rich Internet Application (RIA) interface, which operates by Web browser, and is used to register the RFID tags situated in the aisles and the QR codes located on shelves (López-de-Ipiña and 37-38). A typical use-scenario for Blind Shopping involves a user activating the system by tracing an “L” on the screen or issuing the “Location” voice command, which activates the supermarket navigation system which then asks the user to either touch an RFID floor marking with their cane or scan a QR code on a nearby shelf to orient the system. The application then asks the user to dictate the product or category of product that they wish to locate. The smart phone maintains a continuous Bluetooth connection with the RFID reader to keep track of user location at all times. By drawing a “P” or issuing the “Product” voice command, a user can switch the device into product recognition mode where the smart phone camera is pointed at an embossed QR code on a shelf to retrieve information about a product such as manufacturer, name, weight, and price, via synthetic speech (López-de-Ipiña et al. 38-39). Despite both systems aiming to operate with as little environmental adjustment as possible, as well as minimise the extent to which a supermarket would need to allocate infrastructural, administrative, and human resources to implementing assistive technologies for vision impaired shoppers, there will undoubtedly be significant establishment and maintenance costs associated with the adoption of production versions of systems resembling either prototype described in this paper. As both systems rely on data obtained from a server by invoking Web services, supermarkets would need to provide in-store WiFi. Further, both systems’ dependence on store inventory data would mean that commercial versions of either of these systems are likely to be supermarket specific or exclusive given that there will be policies in place that forbid access to inventory systems, which contain pricing information to third parties. Secondly, an assumption in the design of both prototypes is that the shopping task ends with the user arriving at home; this overlooks the important task of being able to recognise products in order to put them away or to use at a later time.The BCM and QR product recognition components of both respective prototypic systems associates information to products in order to assist users in the product search and selection sub-tasks. However, information such as use-by dates, discount offers, country of manufacture, country of manufacturer’s origin, nutritional information, and the labelling of products as Halal, Kosher, containing alcohol, nuts, gluten, lactose, phenylalanine, and so on, create further challenges in how different data sources are managed within the devices’ software architecture. The reliance of both systems on existing smartphone technology is also problematic. Changes in the production and uptake of mobile communication devices, and the software that they operate on, occurs rapidly. Once the fit-out of a retail space with the necessary instrumentation in order to accommodate a particular system has occurred, this system is unlikely to be able to cater to the requirement for frequent upgrades, as built environments are less flexible in the upgrading of their technological infrastructure (Kellerman 148). This sets up a scenario where the supermarket may persist as a disabling space due to a gap between the functional capacities of applications designed for mobile communication devices and the environments in which they are to be used. Lists and Disabling Spatial PracticeThe development and provision of access to assistive technologies and the data they rely upon is a commercial issue (Ellis and Kent 7). The use of assistive technologies in supermarket-spaces that rely on the inter-functional coordination of multiple inventories may have the unintended effect of excluding people with disabilities from access to legitimate content (Ellis and Kent 7). With de Certeau, we can ask of supermarket-space “What spatial practices correspond, in the area where discipline is manipulated, to these apparatuses that produce a disciplinary space?" (96).In designing assistive technologies, such as those discussed in this paper, developers must strive to achieve integration across multiple data inventories. Software architectures must be optimised to overcome issues relating to intellectual property, cross platform access, standardisation, fidelity, potential duplication, and mass-storage. This need for “cross sectioning,” however, “merely adds to the muddle” (Lefebvre 8). This is a predicament that only intensifies as space and objects in space become increasingly “representable” (Galloway), and as the impetus for the project of spatial politics for the vision impaired moves beyond representation to centre on access and meaning-making.ConclusionSupermarkets act as sites of hegemony, resistance, difference, and transformation, where the vision impaired and their allies resist the “repressive socialization of impaired bodies” through their own social movements relating to environmental accessibility and the technology assisted spatial practice of shopping (Gleeson 129). It is undeniable that the prototype technologies described in this paper, and those like it, indeed do have a great deal of emancipatory potential. However, it should be understood that these devices produce representations of supermarket-space as a simulation within a framework that attempts to mimic the real, and these representations are pre-determined by the industrial, technological, and regulatory forces that govern their production (Lefebvre 8). Thus, the potential of assistive technologies is dependent upon a range of constraints relating to data accessibility, and the interaction of various kinds of lists across the geographic area that surrounds the supermarket, locomotor, haptic, and search spaces of the supermarket, the home-space, and the internal spaces of a shopper’s imaginary. These interactions are important in contributing to the reproduction of disability in supermarkets through the use of assistive shopping technologies. The ways by which people make and read shopping lists complicate the relations between supermarket-space as location data and product inventories versus that which is intuited and experienced by a shopper (Sutherland). Not only should we be creating inventories of supermarket locomotor, haptic, and search spaces, the attention of developers working in this area of assistive technologies should look beyond the challenges of spatial representation and move towards a focus on issues of interoperability and expanded access of spatial inventory databases and data within and beyond supermarket-space.ReferencesDe Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Print.De Souza e Silva, A. “From Cyber to Hybrid: Mobile Technologies As Interfaces of Hybrid Spaces.” Space and Culture 9.3 (2006): 261-78.Ellis, Katie, and Mike Kent. Disability and New Media. New York: Routledge, 2011.Farman, Jason. Mobile Interface Theory: Embodied Space and Locative Media. New York: Routledge, 2012.Galloway, Alexander. “Are Some Things Unrepresentable?” Theory, Culture and Society 28 (2011): 85-102.Gleeson, Brendan. Geographies of Disability. London: Routledge, 1999.Goggin, Gerard. Cell Phone Culture: Mobile Technology in Everyday Life. London: Routledge, 2006.Haber, Alex. “Mapping the Void in Perec’s Species of Spaces.” Tattered Fragments of the Map. Ed. Adam Katz and Brian Rosa. S.l.: Thelimitsoffun.org, 2009.Jolley, William M. When the Tide Comes in: Towards Accessible Telecommunications for People with Disabilities in Australia. Sydney: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 2003.Keaggy, Bill. Milk Eggs Vodka: Grocery Lists Lost and Found. Cincinnati, Ohio: HOW Books, 2007.Kellerman, Aharon. Personal Mobilities. London: Routledge, 2006.Kleege, Georgia. “Blindness and Visual Culture: An Eyewitness Account.” The Disability Studies Reader. 2nd edition. Ed. Lennard J. Davis. New York: Routledge, 2006. 391-98.Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991.López-de-Ipiña, Diego, Tania Lorido, and Unai López. “Indoor Navigation and Product Recognition for Blind People Assisted Shopping.” Ambient Assisted Living. Ed. J. Bravo, R. Hervás, and V. Villarreal. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2011. 25-32. May, Michael, and Charles LaPierre. “Accessible Global Position System (GPS) and Related Orientation Technologies.” Assistive Technology for Visually Impaired and Blind People. Ed. Marion A. Hersh, and Michael A. Johnson. London: Springer-Verlag, 2008. 261-88. Nicholson, John, Vladimir Kulyukin, and Daniel Coster. “Shoptalk: Independent Blind Shopping Through Verbal Route Directions and Barcode Scans.” The Open Rehabilitation Journal 2.1 (2009): 11-23.Perec, Georges. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Trans. and Ed. John Sturrock. London: Penguin Books, 1997.Schillmeier, Michael W. J. Rethinking Disability: Bodies, Senses, and Things. New York: Routledge, 2010.Sutherland, I. “Mobile Media and the Socio-Technical Protocols of the Supermarket.” Australian Journal of Communication. 36.1 (2009): 73-84.

In the HBO series The Sopranos, Tony and his friends use “prosthetic memories” to anchor their ethnic and criminal identities. Prosthetic memories were theorised by Alison Landsberg in her book Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. She argues that prosthetic memories are memories acquired through the mass media and do not come from a person’s lived experience in any sense (Landsberg 20). In this article, I will outline how The Sopranos television show and its characters interact with prosthetic memories. Extending Christopher Kocela’s work on The Sopranos and white ethnicities, I will show how characters use prosthetic memories to define their ethnicity while the show itself knowingly plays with this to provide comedic and critical commentary about the influence of gangster stereotypes. According to Landsberg, prosthetic memories are powerful memories of historical events or narratives that an individual was not present for. They are typically formed at the "interface between a personal and historical narrative about the past at an experiential site such as a movie theatre or museum" (2). It is at such a moment that a person can suture themselves into a larger history. Consequently, these memories do not just enhance an individual’s apprehension of a historical event. Rather, they create a deeply felt personal memory of a past event through which they did not live (Landsberg 4). Prosthetic memories are largely made available through the technologies of mass culture such as film, television and experiential places like museums. Their accessibility helps to differentiate them from other cultural strategies for passing on memories to future generations. Other strategies have typically been rooted in the cultural or racial status of an individual (Landsberg 22). In addition, Landsberg asserts that the successfulness of mnemotechnic rituals like the Jewish Passover Seder is dependent on ethnicity (26). Similarly, Walter Benn Michaels concludes that these rituals can only be effective if the individual has “some prior assumption of identity between you and them and this assumption is often racial” (680). Contrastingly, the perpetuation of prosthetic memories through mass media makes them widely accessible across racial lines. According to Landsberg, they are not “naturally- ethnically, racially or biologically- one’s intended inheritance” (26). Prosthetic memories introduce the possibility that memories can be acquired by anyone. The technologies of mass culture make these memories portable and as such, challenges the assumption that memory is “in anyway essential or organically grounded or the private property of a specific ethnic or racial group” (27). In The Sopranos, most characters are third or fourth generation Italian immigrants. Much like for many ‘real’ Italian migrants, time has severed familial connections to their homeland (see Landsberg 49-55). Landsberg suggests that immigrants initially became Americanised in order to escape persecution and being labelled as “other” (51). This meant that ethnically exclusive mnemotechnic rituals were not preserved for subsequent generations of immigrants. In order to sustain an ethnic identity, immigrants (and the characters in The Sopranos) have been forced to turn to more accessible tools like prosthetic memories. Christopher Kocela’s analysis of Italian-Americanness in The Sopranos, argues that characters maintain an Italian American ethnicity while still racially identifying as white. According to Colin Webster “white ethnicity” can be best exemplified through the long tradition of European immigration to America (295). With the influx of immigrants, there was a codification of the idea that “some whites are ‘whiter’ than others” (Webster 297). European working-class immigrants struggled to be afforded the same white “privileges” and membership to the white race. Instead, they were defined as being members of “other” white ethnicities. Roediger argued that such a denial of whiteness pushed European immigrants to insist on their own whiteness by defining themselves against other ethnic minorities like African Americans (8). Between 1890 and 1945, eventual assimilation saw white ethnicities become “fully white” (Roediger 8). Webster argues that: “In this sense, whiteness is nearly always salvageable in a way that black, Mexican, Asian, and Native American ethnicity is not (sic)” (Webster 297). In a similar vein, Kocela suggests that the assimilated characters in The Sopranos benefit from their white racial status while still maintaining an Italian ethnicity. This celebration of ethnic difference by Tony and his friends can serve as a smokescreen for the silent maintenance of whiteness (Kocela 14). Kocela suggests that the show critiques these types of responses that characters have to their ethnicity, stating that "we do not learn from The Sopranos the language of ethnic sons deprived of their Italian godfathers, but the language of racial misrecognition spoken by sons whose lost white fathers were never really their own" (16).Kocela’s article provides a useful discussion about the relationship that characters in The Sopranos have with their ethnicity. This article extends this discussion by showing how prosthetic memories and characters’ understanding of mass media are a crucial element in how such ethnic identities are formed. This will lead to a discussion about how The Sopranos comments on and treats these adopted stereotypes. “What do poor Italian-immigrants have to do with you?”: How Characters Interact with Prosthetic MemoriesCharacters in The Sopranos heavily rely upon stereotypes from gangster films to perform their version of Italian Americanness. A reliance on prosthetic memories from such films leads to the manifestation of violence being intertwined with the characters’ ethnic identities. Brian Faucette has discussed the inherent link between violence and gangster films from the 1930s-60s. He claims that “it was violence that enabled the upward mobility of these figures” (76). It is almost impossible to separate violence from the gangster films referenced in The Sopranos. As such, violence becomes part of the ritualistic ways prosthetic memories are created. This is evident in the pilot episode of The Sopranos when Christopher performs his first hit (kill). In the scene, he shoots rival gang member, Emil, in the back of the head at Satriales Pork Store. Before the hit, the pair are standing close together in front of a pinboard collage of “classic” Italian movie gangsters. As they both walk away in opposite directions the camera pulls out diagonally to follow Christopher. Throughout the duration of the shot, the collage is always placed behind Christopher. Finally, when the pan stops, Christopher is positioned in the foreground, with the collage behind him to the right. The placement of the collage gives it a front row seat to the ensuing murder while serving as a kind of script for it. It is not enough for Christopher to simply kill Emil, rather it is important that it is done in the presence of his idols in order to ensure his enhanced identification with them. Moreover, for Christopher, being an Italian American gangster and violence are inseparable. He must perform acts of extreme violence in order to suture himself into a larger, stereotypical narrative, that equates Italian-Americanness with the mafia. Through Landsberg’s theory, it is possible to see the intertwined relationship between performances of Italian-Americanness and violence. To enact their version of Italian-Americanism, characters follow the script of masculine-violence inherent to gangster films. As well as tools to perform Italian American identities, prosthetic memories can be used by characters to deny their whiteness. Kocela argues that Tony can deny or affirm his whiteness, depending on the situation. According to Kocela, Tony’s economic success is intrinsically linked to his racial status as a white man (16). However, this is not a view shared by characters in the show. In the episode From Where to Eternity Dr. Melfi asks Tony how he justifies his criminal lifestyle: Tony: When America opened the floodgates and let all us Italians in, what do you think they were doing it for? ... The Carnegies and the Rockefellers, they needed worker bees and there we were. But some of us didn't want to swarm around their hive and lose who we were. We wanted to stay Italian and preserve the things that meant something to us: honor, and family, and loyalty. ... Now we weren't educated like the Americans, but we had the balls to take what we wanted. And those other fucks, the J.P. Morgans, they were crooks and killers too, but that was the business, right? The American way.Dr. Melfi: That might all be true. But what do poor Italian immigrants have to do with you and what happens every morning when you step out of bed?Kocela describes Tony’s response as a “textbook recitation of the two-family myth of Italian-American identity in which criminal activities are justified in a need to resist assimilation” (28). It is evident that for Tony, being Italian American is defined by being ethnically different. To admit that whiteness contributes to his economic success would undermine the justification he gives for his criminal lifestyle and his self-perceived status as an Italian American. Despite this, Melfi’s statement rings true. The experience of “poor Italian immigrants” does not affect Tony’s daily lifestyle. Characters in The Sopranos do not face the same oppression and discrimination as first-generation migrants (Kocela 28). After decades of assimilation, Tony and his friends turn to the narratives of discrimination and ethnic difference present in gangster films. This is exemplified through Tony’s identification with Vito Corleone from The Godfather. Vito exemplifies Tony’s notion of Italian Americanism. He was a poor immigrant that turned to criminality to protect the Italian-American community and their way of life. Vito is also connected to Italy in a way that Tony admires. When Paulie asks Tony what his favourite scene from The Godfather is he responds with: Don Ciccio’s Villa, when Vito goes back to Sicily, the crickets, the great old house. Maybe it’s because I’m going over there, ya know? Gangster films and representations of Italian-Americanness often deliberately differentiate Italian families from “regular” white people (D’Acierno 566). According to D’Acierno, gangster narratives often involve two types of Italian families, one that has been left powerless by its assimilation to American culture and another that has resisted this through organised crime (D’Acierno 567). Tony and his friends tap into these narratives in their attempt to create prosthetic memories that differentiate their ethnicity and ultimately draw attention away from the whiteness which silently benefits them.The “inauthenticity” of these prosthetic memories is probably most pronounced in the episode Commendatori when Tony, Christopher and Paulie visit Italy. The trip shatters the expectations that the characters had of their homeland and sheds light on some of their delusions about what it means to be Italian. Paulie expects to love Italy and be greeted with open arms by the locals. Unfortunately, he dislikes it all because it is too foreign for him. At the banquet, Paulie finds the authentic Italian octopus uneatable and instead orders “spaghetti and gravy.” He is also unable to use the bathrooms because he is so used to American toilets. When at a local café he tries to initiate conversation with some local men using broken Italian. Even though they hear him, the group ignores him. Despite all this Paulie, pretends that it was a great trip:Big Pussy: So how was it?Paulie: Fabulous, I felt right at home… I feel sorry for anyone who hasn’t been … especially any Italian. The prosthetic memories that defined these characters’ perceptions of Italy are based on the American media’s portrayal of Italy. Commendatori thus exposes the differences between what is “authentically Italian” and the prosthetic memories about Italy generated by American gangster films. By the end of the episode it has become clear that these “inauthentic” prosthetic memories have forged an entirely different, hybrid ethnic identity.“Louis Brasi sleeps with the fishes”: How The Sopranos Treats Prosthetic MemoriesIntertextuality is an important way through which the audience can understand how The Sopranos treats prosthetic memories. The prosthetic memories generated by characters in The Sopranos are heavily based on stereotypes of Italian Americans. Papaleo states that the Italian stereotype is “composed of overreactions: after bowing, smiling and being funny, the Italian loses control” (93). Mafia films are crucial in defining the identity of Tony and his friends, and David Pattie suggests that they are a “symbolic framework within which Tony, Paulie, Christopher and Silvio attempt to find meaning and justification for their lives” (137). In a similar way, the audience is invited to use these same films as a frame for watching The Sopranos itself. Mafia stereotypes are one of the dominant ways that depict Italian Americans on screen. According to Larke-Walsh, this has perpetuated the belief that crime and Italian-Americanness are synonymous with each other (226). The show is obsessively referential and relies on the viewer’s knowledge of these films for much of its effect. Pattie describes how such use of intertextuality can be explained: "[there are] two ways of looking at self-referential programs: one in which readings of other media texts can be contained first of all within the film or program in which they occur; and a more covert type of referential work, which relies almost exclusively on the audience’s detailed, constantly-updated cultural intelligence" (137). The Sopranos operates on both levels as references that are simultaneously textual and meta-textual. This is evident through the way the show treats The Godfather films. They are by far the most frequently mentioned ones (Golden 95). According to Chris Messenger, the central link between the two is the acknowledgement that “America itself has been totally colonised by The Godfather” (Messenger 95). The Godfather is an urtext that frames how audiences are invited to view the show. As such, The Sopranos invites the viewer to use the Godfather as a lens to uncover extra layers of meaning. For example, The Sopranos uses the misguided ways in which its characters have taken on stereotypes from The Godfather as a source of humour. The series plays on the fact that characters will allow prosthetic memories derived from gangster films to dictate their behaviour. In the pilot episode, Christopher calls “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero to help him dispose of a body. Christopher informs Pussy that it’s his plan to leave the body at a garbage stop to be discovered by the rival Czechoslovakians. Christopher hoped this would emulate the “Luca Brasi situation” from The Godfather and intimidate the Czechoslovakians. When he explains this to Pussy, they have the following exchange. Pussy: The Kolar uncle is gonna find a kid dead on one of his bins and get on our fuckin’ business… no way!Christopher: Louis Brasi sleeps with the fishes.Pussy: Luca Brasi… Luca! There are differences Christopher… okay… from the Luca Brasi situation and this. Look, the Kolar’s know a kid is dead, it hardens their position... plus now the cops are lookin’ for a fuckin’ murderer!To members of the audience who are familiar with The Godfather, it immediately becomes clear that Christopher is comically misguided. In the Godfather, Luca Brasi was murdered because he was caught trying to infiltrate a powerful rival organisation. Fish wrapped in his bullet-proof vest were then sent back to the Corleones in order to notify them that their plan had been foiled (“Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes”). The “Luca Brasi situation” was a calculated and strategic move whereas Christopher’s situation amounts to a seemingly random, unauthorised killing. This sequence in The Sopranos uses this comparison for comedic effect and plays on the stereotype that all Italian Americans are mafioso and that all mafia behaviour is interchangeable. The symbolic language of the “Luca Brasi” scene is contrasted with explicit shots of a slumped, lifeless body. These shots are a source of macabre humour. The audience is invited to laugh at the contrast between the subtle, thoughtful nature of the Luca Brasi situation and the brash violence of Christopher’s own predicament. Through this comedic situation, The Sopranos critiques Christopher’s aspiration to be a godfather-esque gangster by showing his incompetence. Christopher’s misreading of the situation is further emphasised by his mistakenly referring to Luca Brasi as “Louis”. After Pussy says: “There are differences… from the Luca Brasi situation and this”, the dialogue pauses and the scene cuts to an immediate close up of Emil’s body falling to the side. This illustrates that part of the joke is that characters are willing to allow prosthetic memories derived from gangster films to dictate their behaviour, no matter how inappropriate. Therefore, Christopher is willing to refer to a scene from the Godfather that fails to account for the context of a situation without even consulting the knowledge of Big Pussy. This leads to a larger critique of the ways in which films like The Godfather are presented as a script for all Italian Americans to follow. Nevertheless, The Sopranos still has a role in perpetuating these same stereotypes. Tomasulo has argued that "despite its use of postclassical generic, narrative aesthetic devices, and its creation by an Italian American, The Sopranos relies heavily on demeaning tropes of ethnicity, class, sexuality and gender" (206). This results in a perpetuation of negative stereotypes about working class Italian Americans that affirm old Hollywood clichés. While The Sopranos has tried to transcend this through complex characterisation, irony and universalisation, Tomasulo asserts that most audiences “take The Sopranos as straight - that is a raw unvarnished anthropology of Americans of Italian descent” (206). The origin of characters’ anti-social personalities seems to stem directly from their ethnicity and their being Italian appears to constitute an explanation for their behaviour. In his article Kocela discusses the complicated relationship that characters have with their white ethnicity. Through an application of Landsberg’s theory it is possible to understand how these ethnicities are initially formed and how they continue to circulate. In response to assimilation, characters in The Sopranos have turned to mass media to generate prosthetic memories of their ethnic heritage. These memories generally originate in classic gangster films. They are used by characters in The Sopranos to deny their whiteness and justify their criminality. The Sopranos itself comments on the complex ways that characters interpret gangster film stereotypes for both comedic and critical commentary. In the epilogue of her book, Landsberg asks: “How can we be sure the politics inspired by prosthetic memories are progressive and ethical?” Prosthetic memories generated by gangster texts are almost inherently problematic. Scholars have criticised the hyper-aggressive masculinity and regressive gender roles that are rampant throughout the genre (Larke-Walsh 226). For Tony and his friends, these problematic gender politics have helped justify their criminal lifestyle and valorised violence as part of ethnic performance. Similarly, these stereotypes are not always circulated critically and are at times perpetuated for audience enjoyment. AcknowledgmentI would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Michelle Phillipov for providing constructive feedback on earlier drafts. References“Commendatori.” The Sopranos: The Complete Second Season. Writ. David Chase. Dir. Tim Van Patten. HBO, 2000. DVD.Coppola, Francis, and Mario Puzo. The Godfather. Hollywood, CA: Paramount Home Video, 1972.“D-Girl.” The Sopranos: The Complete Second Season. Writ. Todd A. Kessler. Dir. Allen Coulter. HBO, 2000. DVD.D'Acierno, Pellegrino. “Cinema Paradiso.” The Italian American Heritage: A Companion to Literature and Arts. New York: Garland, 1999. 563-690.Faucette, Brian. "Interrogations of Masculinity: Violence and the Retro-Gangster Cycle of the 60s." Atenea 28.1 (2008): 75-85.“From Where to Eternity.” The Sopranos: The Complete Second Season. Writ. Michael Imperioli. Dir. Henry Bronchtein. HBO, 2000. DVD. Golden, Cameron. "You're Annette Bening? Dreams and Hollywood Subtext in The Sopranos." Lavery, David. Reading The Sopranos: Hit TV from H.B.O. London: I.B. Tauris, 2006. 91-103.Kocela, Christopher. "Unmade Men: The Sopranos after Whiteness." Postmodern Culture 15.2 (2005). <http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/issue.105/15.2kocela.html>.Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memories: The Transformation of American Rememberance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.Messenger, Christopher. Godfather and American Culture: How the Corleones Became Our Gang. New York: State University of New York Press, 2002.Michaels, Walter Ben. "Race into Culture: A Critical Geneology of Cultural Identity." Critical Inquiry 18.4 (1992): 655-85.Larke-Walsh, George. Screening the Mafia: Masculinity, Ethnicity and Mobsters from The Godfather to The Sopranos. Jefferson: McFarland, 2010.Papaleo, Joseph. "Ethnic Images and Ethnic Fate: The Media Image of Italian Americans." Ethnic Images in American Film and Television (1978): 44-95.Pattie, David. "Mobbed Up: The Sopranos and the Modern Gangster Film." Lavery, David. This Thing of Ours: Investigating The Sopranos. New York: Wallflower Press, 2002. 137-152.Roediger, D.R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London: Verso, 2007. Thorburn, D. "The Sopranos." In The Essential H.B.O Reader, eds. G. Edgerton and J. Jones. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2008. 61-70.Tomasulo, Frank. "The Guinea as Tragic Hero: The Complex Representation of Italian Americans." In The Essential Sopranos Reader, eds. David Lavery, Douglas Howard, and Paul Levinson. Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2011. 196-207.“The Sopranos.” The Sopranos: The Complete First Season. Writ. David Chase. Dir. David Chase. HBO, 1999. DVD. “Walk like a Man.” The Sopranos: The Complete Sixth Season. Writ. Terence Winter. Dir. Terence Winter. HBO, 2007. DVD. Webster, Colin. "Marginalized White Ethnicity, Race and Crime." Theoretical Criminology 12 (2008): 293-312.

‘Bitzer,’ said Thomas Gradgrind. ‘Your definition of a horse.’‘Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.’ Thus (and much more) Bitzer.‘Now girl number twenty,’ said Mr. Gradgrind. ‘You know what a horse is.’— Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854)Dickens’s famous pedant, Thomas Gradgrind, was not an anomaly. He is the pedagogical manifestation of the rise of quantification in modernism that was the necessary adjunct to massive urbanisation and industrialisation. His classroom caricatures the dominant epistemic modality of modern global democracies, our unwavering trust in numbers, “data”, and reproductive predictability. This brief quotation from Hard Times both presents and parodies the 19th century’s displacement of what were previously more commonly living and heterogeneous existential encounters with events and things. The world had not yet been made predictably repetitive through industrialisation, standardisation, law, and ubiquitous codes of construction. Theirs was much more a world of unique events and not the homogenised and orthodox iteration of standardised knowledge. Horses and, by extension, all entities and events gradually were displaced by their rote definitions: individuals of a so-called natural kind were reduced to identicals. Further, these mechanical standardisations were and still are underwritten by mapping them into a numerical and extensive characterisation. On top of standardised objects and procedures appeared assigned numerical equivalents which lent standardisation the seemingly apodictic certainty of deductive demonstrations. The algebraic becomes the socially enforced criterion for the previously more sensory, qualitative, and experiential encounters with becoming that were more likely in pre-industrial life. Here too, we see that the function of this reproductive protocol is not just notational but is the sine qua non for, in Althusser’s famous phrase, the manufacture of citizens as “subject subjects”, those concrete individuals who are educated to understand themselves ideologically in an imaginary relation with their real position in any society’s self-reproduction. Here, however, ideology performs that operation through that nominally least political of cognitive modes, the supposed friend of classical Marxism’s social science, the mathematical. The historical onset of this social and political reproductive hegemony, this uniform supplanting of time’s ineluctable differencing with the parasite of its associated model, can partial be found in the formation of metrics. Before the 19th century, the measures of space and time were local. Units of length and weight varied not just between nations but often by municipality. These parochial standards reflected indigenous traditions, actualities, personalities, and needs. This variation in measurement standards suggested that every exchange or judgment of kind and value relied upon the specificity of that instance. Every evaluation of an instance required perceptual acuity and not the banality of enumeration constituted by commodification and the accounting practices intrinsic to centralised governance. This variability in measure was complicated by similar variability in the currencies of the day. Thus, barter presented the participants with complexities and engagements of skills and discrete observation completely alien to the modern purchase of duplicate consumer objects with stable currencies. Almost nothing of life was iterative: every exchange was, more or less, an anomaly. However, in 1790, immediately following the French Revolution and as a central manifestation of its movement to rational democratisation, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand proposed a metrical system to the French National Assembly. The units of this metric system, based originally on observable features of nature, are now formally codified in all scientific practice by seven physical constants. Further, they are ubiquitous now in almost all public exchanges between individuals, corporations, and states. These units form a coherent and extensible structure whose elements and rules are subject to seemingly lossless symbolic exchange in a mathematic coherence aided by their conformity to decimal representation. From 1960, their basic contemporary form was established as the International System of Units (SI). Since then, all but three of the countries of the world (Myanmar, Liberia, and the United States), regardless of political organisation and individual history, have adopted these standards for commerce and general measurement. The uniformity and rational advantage of this system is easily demonstrable in just the absurd variation in the numeric bases of the Imperial / British system which uses base 16 for ounces/pounds, base 12 for inches/feet, base three for feet/yards, base 180 for degrees between freezing and cooling, 43,560 square feet per acre, eights for division of inches, etc. Even with its abiding antagonism to the French, Britain officially adopted the metric system as was required by its admission to the EU in 1973. The United States is the last great holdout in the public use of the metric system even though SI has long been the standard wanted by the federal government. At first, the move toward U.S. adoption was promising. Following France and rejecting England’s practice, America was founded on a decimal currency system in 1792. In 1793, Jefferson requested a copy of the standard kilogram from France in a first attempt to move to the metric system: however, the ship carrying the copy was captured by pirates. Indeed, The Metric Conversion Act of 1975 expressed a more serious national intention to adopt SI, but after some abortive efforts, the nation fell back into the more archaic measurements dominant since before its revolution. However, the central point remains that while the U.S. is unique in its public measurement standard among dominant powers, it is equally committed to the hegemonic application of a numerical rendition of events.The massive importance of this underlying uniformity is that it supplies the central global mechanism whereby the world’s chaotic variation is continuously parsed and supplanted into comparable, intelligible, and predictable units that understand individuating difference as anomaly. Difference, then, is understood in this method not as qualitative and intensive, which it necessarily is, but quantitative and extensive. Like Gradgrind’s “horse”, the living and unique thing is rendered through the Apollonian dream of standardisation and enumeration. While differencing is the only inherent quality of time’s chaotic flow, accounting and management requite iteration. To order the reproduction of modern society, the unique individuating differences that render an object as “this one”, what the Medieval logicians called haecceities, are only seen as “accidental” and “non-essential” deviations. This is not just odd but illogical since these very differences allow events to be individuated items so to appear as countable at all. As Leibniz’s principle, the indiscernibility of identicals, suggests, the application of the metrical same to different occasions is inherently paradoxical: if each unit were truly the same, there could only be one. As the etymology of “anomaly” suggests, it is that which is unexpected, irregular, out of line, or, going back to the Greek, nomos, at variance with the law. However, as the only “law” that always is at hand is the so-called “Second Law of Thermodynamics”, the inconsistently consistent roiling of entropy, the evident theoretical question might be, “how is anomaly possible when regularity itself is impossible?” The answer lies not in events “themselves” but exactly in the deductive valorisations projected by that most durable invention of the French Revolution adumbrated above, the metric system. This seemingly innocuous system has formed the reproductive and iterative bias of modern post-industrial perceptual homogenisation. Metrical modeling allows – indeed, requires – that one mistake the metrical changeling for the experiential event it replaces. Gilles Deleuze, that most powerful French metaphysician (1925-1995) offers some theories to understand the seminal production (not reproduction) of disparity that is intrinsic to time and to distinguish it from its homogenised representation. For him, and his sometime co-author, Felix Guattari, time’s “chaosmosis” is the host constantly parasitised by its symbolic model. This problem, however, of standardisation in the face of time’s originality, is obscured by its very ubiquity; we must first denaturalise the seemingly self-evident metrical concept of countable and uniform units.A central disagreement in ancient Greece was between the proponents of physis (often translated as “nature” but etymologically indicative of growth and becoming, process and not fixed form) and nomos (law or custom). This is one of the first ethical and so political debates in Western philosophy. For Heraclitus and other pre-Socratics, the emphatic character of nature was change, its differencing dynamism, its processual but not iterative character. In anticipation of Hume, Sophists disparaged nomos (νόμος) as simply the habituated application of synthetic law and custom to the fluidity of natural phenomena. The historical winners of this debate, Plato and the scientific attitudes of regularity and taxonomy characteristic of his best pupil, Aristotle, have dominated ever since, but not without opponents.In the modern era, anti-enlightenment figures such as Hamann, Herder, and the Schlegel brothers gave theoretical voice to romanticism’s repudiation of the paradoxical impulses of the democratic state for regulation and uniformity that Talleyrand’s “revolutionary” metrical proposal personified. They saw the correlationalism (as adumbrated by Meillassoux) between thought and thing based upon their hypothetical equitability as a betrayal of the dynamic physis that experience presented. Variable infinity might come either from the character of God or nature or, as famously in Spinoza’s Ethics, both (“deus sive natura”). In any case, the plenum of nature was never iterative. This rejection of metrical regularity finds its synoptic expression in Nietzsche. As a classicist, Nietzsche supplies the bridge between the pre-Socratics and the “post-structuralists”. His early mobilisation of the Apollonian, the dream of regularity embodied in the sun god, and the Dionysian, the drunken but inarticulate inexpression of the universe’s changing manifold, gives voice to a new resistance to the already dominate metrical system. His is a new spin of the mythic representatives of Nomos and physis. For him, this pair, however, are not – as they are often mischaracterised – in dialectical dialogue. To place them into the thesis / antithesis formulation would be to give them the very binary character that they cannot share and to, tacitly, place both under Apollo’s procedure of analysis. Their modalities are not antithetical but mutually exclusive. To represent the chaotic and non-iterative processes of becoming, of physis, under the rubric of a common metrics, nomos, is to mistake the parasite for the host. In its structural hubris, the ideological placebo of metrical knowing thinks it non-reductively captures the multiplicity it only interpellates. In short, the polyvalent, fluid, and inductive phenomena that empiricists try to render are, in their intrinsic character, unavailable to deductive method except, first, under the reductive equivalence (the Gradgrind pedagogy) of metrical modeling. This incompatibility of physis and nomos was made manifest by David Hume in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) just before the cooptation of the 18th century’s democratic revolutions by “representative” governments. There, Hume displays the Apollonian dream’s inability to accurately and non-reductively capture a phenomenon in the wild, free from the stringent requirements of synthetic reproduction. His argument in Book I is succinct.Now as we call every thing custom, which proceeds from a past repetition, without any new reasoning or conclusion, we may establish it as a certain truth, that all the belief, which follows upon any present impression, is deriv'd solely from that origin. (Part 3, Section 8)There is nothing in any object, consider'd in itself, which can afford us a reason for drawing a conclusion beyond it; ... even after the observation of the frequent or constant conjunction of objects, we have no reason to draw any inference concerning any object beyond those of which we have had experience. (Part 3, Section 12)The rest of mankind ... are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. (Part 4, Section 6)In sum, then, nomos is nothing but habit, a Pavlovian response codified into a symbolic representation and, pragmatically, into a reproductive protocol specifically ordered to exclude anomaly, the inherent chaotic variation that is the hallmark of physis. The Apollonian dream that there can be an adequate metric of unrestricted natural phenomena in their full, open, turbulent, and manifold becoming is just that, a dream. Order, not chaos, is the anomaly. Of course, Kant felt he had overcome this unacceptable challenge to rational application to induction after Hume woke him from his “dogmatic slumber”. But what is perhaps one of the most important assertions of the critiques may be only an evasion of Hume’s radical empiricism: “there are only two ways we can account for the necessary agreement of experience with the concepts of its objects: either experience makes these concepts possible or these concepts make experience possible. The former supposition does not hold of the categories (nor of pure sensible intuition) ... . There remains ... only the second—a system ... of the epigenesis of pure reason” (B167). Unless “necessary agreement” means the dictatorial and unrelenting insistence in a symbolic model of perception of the equivalence of concept and appearance, this assertion appears circular. This “reading” of Kant’s evasion of the very Humean crux, the necessary inequivalence of a metric or concept to the metered or defined, is manifest in Nietzsche.In his early “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (1873), Nietzsche suggests that there is no possible equivalence between a concept and its objects, or, to use Frege’s vocabulary, between sense or reference. We speak of a "snake" [see “horse” in Dickens]: this designation touches only upon its ability to twist itself and could therefore also fit a worm. What arbitrary differentiations! What one-sided preferences, first for this, then for that property of a thing! The various languages placed side by side show that with words it is never a question of truth, never a question of adequate expression; otherwise, there would not be so many languages. The "thing in itself" (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for. This creator only designates the relations of things to men, and for expressing these relations he lays hold of the boldest metaphors.The literal is always already a reductive—as opposed to literature’s sometimes expansive agency—metaphorisation of events as “one of those” (a token of “its” type). The “necessary” equivalence in nomos is uncovered but demanded. The same is reproduced by the habitual projection of certain “essential qualities” at the expense of all those others residing in every experiential multiplicity. Only in this prison of nomos can anomaly appear: otherwise all experience would appear as it is, anomalous. With this paradoxical metaphor of the straight and equal, Nietzsche inverts the paradigm of scientific expression. He reveals as a repressive social and political obligation the symbolic assertion homology where actually none can be. Supposed equality and measurement all transpire within an Apollonian “dream within a dream”. The concept captures not the manifold of chaotic experience but supplies its placebo instead by an analytic tautology worthy of Gradgrind. The equivalence of event and definition is always nothing but a symbolic iteration. Such nominal equivalence is nothing more than shifting events into a symbolic frame where they can be commodified, owned, and controlled in pursuit of that tertiary equivalence which has become the primary repressive modality of modern societies: money. This article has attempted, with absurd rapidity, to hint why some ubiquitous concepts, which are generally considered self-evident and philosophically unassailable, are open not only to metaphysical, political, and ethical challenge, but are existentially unjustified. All this was done to defend the smaller thesis that the concept of anomaly is itself a reflection of a global misrepresentation of the chaos of becoming. This global substitution expresses a conservative model and measure of the world in the place of the world’s intrinsic heterogenesis, a misrepresentation convenient for those who control the representational powers of governance. In conclusion, let us look, again too briefly, at a philosopher who neither accepts this normative world picture of regularity nor surrenders to Nietzschean irony, Gilles Deleuze.Throughout his career, Deleuze uses the word “pure” with senses antithetical to so-called common sense and, even more, Kant. In its traditional concept, pure means an entity or substance whose essence is not mixed or adulterated with any other substance or material, uncontaminated by physical pollution, clean and immaculate. The pure is that which is itself itself. To insure intelligibility, that which is elemental, alphabetic, must be what it is itself and no other. This discrete character forms the necessary, if often tacit, precondition to any analysis and decomposition of beings into their delimited “parts” that are subject to measurement and measured disaggregation. Any entity available for structural decomposition, then, must be pictured as constituted exhaustively by extensive ones, measurable units, its metrically available components. Dualism having established as its primary axiomatic hypothesis the separability of extension and thought must now overcome that very separation with an adequacy, a one to one correspondence, between a supposedly neatly measurable world and ideological hegemony that presents itself as rational governance. Thus, what is needed is not only a purity of substance but a matching purity of reason, and it is this clarification of thought, then, which, as indicated above, is the central concern of Kant’s influential and grand opus, The Critique of Pure Reason.Deleuze heard a repressed alternative to the purity of the measured self-same and equivalent that, as he said about Plato, “rumbled” under the metaphysics of analysis. This was the dark tradition he teased out of the Stoics, Ockham, Gregory of Rimini, Nicholas d’Autrecourt, Spinoza, Meinong, Bergson, Nietzsche, and McLuhan. This is not the purity of identity, A = A, of metrical uniformity and its shadow, anomaly. Rather than repressing, Deleuze revels in the perverse purity of differencing, difference constituted by becoming without the Apollonian imposition of normalcy or definitional identity. One cannot say “difference in itself” because its ontology, its genesis, is not that of anything itself but exactly the impossibility of such a manner of constitution: universal anomaly. No thing or idea can be iterative, separate, or discrete.In his Difference and Repetition, the idea of the purely same is undone: the Ding an sich is a paradox. While the dogmatic image of thought portrays the possibility of the purely self-same, Deleuze never does. His notions of individuation without individuals, of modulation without models, of simulacra without originals, always finds a reflection in his attitudes toward, not language as logical structure, but what necessarily forms the differential making of events, the heterogenesis of ontological symptoms. His theory has none of the categories of Pierce’s triadic construction: not the arbitrary of symbols, the “self-representation” of icons, or even the causal relation of indices. His “signs” are symptoms: the non-representational consequences of the forces that are concurrently producing them. Events, then, are the symptoms of the heterogenetic forces that produce, not reproduce them. To measure them is to export them into a representational modality that is ontologically inapplicable as they are not themselves themselves but the consequences of the ongoing differences of their genesis. Thus, the temperature associated with a fever is neither the body nor the disease.Every event, then, is a diaphora, the pure consequent of the multiplicity of the forces it cannot resemble, an original dynamic anomaly without standard. This term, diaphora, appears at the conclusion of that dialogue some consider Plato’s best, the Theaetetus. There we find perhaps the most important discussion of knowledge in Western metaphysics, which in its final moments attempts to understand how knowledge can be “True Judgement with an Account” (201d-210a). Following this idea leads to a theory, usually known as the “Dream of Socrates”, which posits two kinds of existents, complexes and simples, and proposes that “an account” means “an account of the complexes that analyses them into their simple components … the primary elements (prôta stoikheia)” of which we and everything else are composed (201e2). This—it will be noticed—suggests the ancient heritage of Kant’s own attempted purification of mereological (part/whole relations) nested elementals. He attempts the coordination of pure speculative reason to pure practical reason and, thus, attempts to supply the root of measurement and scientific regularity. However, as adumbrated by the Platonic dialogue, the attempted decompositions, speculative and pragmatic, lead to an impasse, an aporia, as the rational is based upon a correspondence and not the self-synthesis of the diaphorae by their own dynamic disequilibrium. Thus the dialogue ends inconclusively; Socrates rejects the solution, which is the problem itself, and leaves to meet his accusers and quaff his hemlock. The proposal in this article is that the diaphorae are all that exists in Deleuze’s world and indeed any world, including ours. Nor is this production decomposable into pure measured and defined elementals, as such decomposition is indeed exactly opposite what differential production is doing. For Deleuze, what exists is disparate conjunction. But in intensive conjunction the same cannot be the same except in so far as it differs. The diaphorae of events are irremediably asymmetric to their inputs: the actual does not resemble the virtual matrix that is its cause. Indeed, any recourse to those supposedly disaggregate inputs, the supposedly intelligible constituents of the measured image, will always but repeat the problematic of metrical representation at another remove. This is not, however, the traditional postmodern trap of infinite meta-shifting, as the diaphoric always is in each instance the very presentation that is sought. Heterogenesis can never be undone, but it can be affirmed. In a heterogenetic monism, what was the insoluble problem of correspondence in dualism is now its paradoxical solution: the problematic per se. What manifests in becoming is not, nor can be, an object or thought as separate or even separable, measured in units of the self-same. Dogmatic thought habitually translates intensity, the differential medium of chaosmosis, into the nominally same or similar so as to suit the Apollonian illusions of “correlational adequacy”. However, as the measured cannot be other than a calculation’s placebo, the correlation is but the shadow of a shadow. Every diaphora is an event born of an active conjunction of differential forces that give rise to this, their product, an interference pattern. Whatever we know and are is not the correlation of pure entities and thoughts subject to measured analysis but the confused and chaotic confluence of the specific, material, aleatory, differential, and unrepresentable forces under which we subsist not as ourselves but as the always changing product of our milieu. In short, only anomaly without a nominal becomes, and we should view any assertion that maps experience into the “objective” modality of the same, self-evident, and normal as a political prestidigitation motivated, not by “truth”, but by established political interest. ReferencesDella Volpe, Galvano. Logic as a Positive Science. London: NLB, 1980.Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.———. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester. New York: Columbia UP, 1990.Guenon, René. The Reign of Quantity. New York: Penguin, 1972.Hawley, K. "Identity and Indiscernibility." Mind 118 (2009): 101-9.Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford: Clarendon, 2014.Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1929.Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Trans. Ray Brassier. New York: Continuum, 2008.Naddaf, Gerard. The Greek Concept of Nature. Albany: SUNY, 2005. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. Trans. Douglas Smith. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.———. “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” Trans. Walter Kaufmann. The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Viking, 1976.Welch, Kathleen Ethel. "Keywords from Classical Rhetoric: The Example of Physis." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 17.2 (1987): 193–204.

Introduction This article situates the dark as a liminal and creative space of experimentation where tensions are generative and people tinker with emerging technologies to create alternative futures. Darkness need not mean chaos and fear of violence – it can mean privacy and protection. We define dark as an experimental space based upon uncertainties rather than computational knowns (Bridle) and then demonstrate via a case study of cryptocurrencies the contribution of dark and liminal social spaces to future(s)-making. Cryptocurrencies are digital cash systems that use decentralised (peer-to-peer) networking to enable irreversible payments (Maurer, Nelms, and Swartz). Cryptocurrencies are often clones or variations on the ‘original’ Bitcoin payment systems protocol (Trump et al.) that was shared with the cryptographic community through a pseudonymous and still unknown author(s) (Nakamoto), creating a founder mystery. Due to the open creation process, a new cryptocurrency is relatively easy to make. However, many of them are based on speculative bubbles that mirror Bitcoin, Ethereum, and ICOs’ wealth creation. Examples of cryptocurrencies now largely used for speculation due to their volatility in holding value are rampant, with online clearing houses competing to trade hundreds of different assets from AAVE to ZIL. Many of these altcoins have little to no following or trading volume, leading to their obsolescence. Others enjoy immense popularity among dedicated communities of backers and investors. Consequently, while many cryptocurrency experiments fail or lack adoption and drop from the purview of history, their constant variation also contributes to the undertow of the future that pulls against more visible surface waves of computational progress. The article is structured to first define how we understand and leverage ‘dark’ against computational cultures. We then apply thematic and analytical tactics to articulate future-making socio-technical experiments in the dark. Based on past empirical work of the authors (Maddox "Netnography") we focus on crypto-cultures’ complex emancipatory and normative tensions via themes of construction, disruption, contention, redirection, obsolescence, and iteration. Through these themes we illustrate the mutation and absorption of dark experimental spaces into larger social structures. The themes we identify are not meant as a complete or necessarily serial set of occurrences, but nonetheless contribute a new vocabulary for students of technology and media to see into and grapple with the dark. Embracing the Dark: Prework & Analytical Tactics for Outside the Known To frame discussion of the dark here as creative space for alternative futures, we focus on scholars who have deeply engaged with notions of socio-technical darkness. This allows us to explore outside the blinders of computational light and, with a nod to Sassen, dig in the shadows of known categories to evolve the analytical tactics required for the study of emerging socio-technical conditions. We understand the Dark Web to usher shifting and multiple definitions of darkness, from a moral darkness to a technical one (Gehl). From this work, we draw the observation of how technologies that obfuscate digital tracking create novel capacities for digital cultures in spaces defined by anonymity for both publisher and user. Darknets accomplish this by overlaying open internet protocols (e.g. TCP/IP) with non-standard protocols that encrypt and anonymise information (Pace). Pace traces concepts of darknets to networks in the 1970s that were 'insulated’ from the internet’s predecessor ARPANET by air gap, and then reemerged as software protocols similarly insulated from cultural norms around intellectual property. ‘Darknets’ can also be considered in ternary as opposed to binary terms (Gehl and McKelvey) that push to make private that which is supposed to be public infrastructure, and push private platforms (e.g. a Personal Computer) to make public networks via common bandwidth. In this way, darknets feed new possibilities of communication from both common infrastructures and individual’s platforms. Enabling new potentials of community online and out of sight serves to signal what the dark accomplishes for the social when measured against an otherwise unending light of computational society. To this point, a new dark age can be welcomed insofar it allows an undecided future outside of computational logics that continually define and refine the possible and probable (Bridle). This argument takes von Neumann’s 1945 declaration that “all stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control” (in Bridle 21) as a founding statement for computational thought and indicative of current society. The hope expressed by Bridle is not an absence of knowledge, but an absence of knowing the future. Past the computational prison of total information awareness within an accelerating information age (Castells) is the promise of new formations of as yet unknowable life. Thus, from Bridle’s perspective, and ours, darkness can be a place of freedom and possibility, where the equality of being in the dark, together, is not as threatening as current privileged ways of thinking would suggest (Bridle 15). The consequences of living in a constant glaring light lead to data hierarchies “leaching” (Bridle) into everything, including social relationships, where our data are relationalised while our relations are datafied (Maddox and Heemsbergen) by enforcing computational thinking upon them. Darkness becomes a refuge that acknowledges the power of unknowing, and a return to potential for social, equitable, and reciprocal relations. This is not to say that we envision a utopian life without the shadow of hierarchy, but rather an encouragement to dig into those shadows made visible only by the brightest of lights. The idea of digging in the shadows is borrowed from Saskia Sassen, who asks us to consider the ‘master categories’ that blind us to alternatives. According to Sassen (402), while master categories have the power to illuminate, their blinding power keeps us from seeing other presences in the landscape: “they produce, then, a vast penumbra around that center of light. It is in that penumbra that we need to go digging”. We see darkness in the age of digital ubiquity as rejecting the blinding ‘master category’ of computational thought. Computational thought defines social/economic/political life via what is static enough to predict or unstable enough to render a need to control. Otherwise, the observable, computable, knowable, and possible all follow in line. Our dig in the shadows posits a penumbra of protocols – both of computational code and human practice – that circle the blinding light of known digital communications. We use the remainder of this short article to describe these themes found in the dark that offer new ways to understand the movements and moments of potential futures that remain largely unseen. Thematic Resonances in the Dark This section considers cryptocultures of the dark. We build from a thematic vocabulary that has been previously introduced from empirical examples of the crypto-market communities which tinker with and through the darkness provided by encryption and privacy technologies (Maddox "Netnography"). Here we refine these future-making themes through their application to events surrounding community-generated technology aimed at disrupting centralised banking systems: cryptocurrencies (Maddox, Singh, et al.). Given the overlaps in collective values and technologies between crypto-communities, we find it useful to test the relevance of these themes to the experimental dynamics surrounding cryptocurrencies. We unpack these dynamics as construction, rupture and disruption, redirection, and the flip-sided relationship between obsolescence and iteration leading to mutation and absorption. This section provides a working example for how these themes adapt in application to a community dwelling at the edge of experimental technological possibilities. The theme of construction is both a beginning and a materialisation of a value field. It originates within the cyberlibertarians’ ideological stance towards using technological innovations to ‘create a new world in the shell of the old’ (van de Sande) which has been previously expressed through the concept of constructive activism (Maddox, Barratt, et al.). This libertarian ideology is also to be found in the early cultures that gave rise to cryptocurrencies. Through their interest in the potential of cryptography technologies related to social and political change, the Cypherpunks mailing list formed in 1992 (Swartz). The socio-cultural field surrounding cryptocurrencies, however, has always consisted of a diverse ecosystem of vested interests building collaborations from “goldbugs, hippies, anarchists, cyberpunks, cryptographers, payment systems experts, currency activists, commodity traders, and the curious” (Maurer, Nelms, and Swartz 262). Through the theme of construction we can consider architectures of collaboration, cooperation, and coordination developed by technically savvy populations. Cryptocurrencies are often developed as code by teams who build in mechanisms for issuance (e.g. ‘mining’) and other controls (Conway). Thus, construction and making of cryptocurrencies tend to be collective yet decentralised. Cryptocurrencies arose during a time of increasing levels of distrust in governments and global financial instability from the Global Financial Crisis (2008-2013), whilst gaining traction through their usefulness in engaging in illicit trade (Saiedi, Broström, and Ruiz). It was through this rupture in the certainties of ‘the old system’ that this technology, and the community developing it, sought to disrupt the financial system (Maddox, Singh, et al.; Nelms et al.). Here we see the utility of the second theme of rupture and disruption to illustrate creative experimentation in the liminal and emergent spaces cryptocurrencies afford. While current crypto crazes (e.g. NFTs, ICOs) have their detractors, Cohen suggests, somewhat ironically, that the momentum for change of the crypto current was “driven by the grassroots, and technologically empowered, movement to confront the ills perceived to be powered and exacerbated by market-based capitalism, such as climate change and income inequality” (Cohen 739). Here we can start to envision how subterranean currents that emerge from creative experimentations in the dark impact global social forces in multifaceted ways – even as they are dragged into the light. Within a disrupted environment characterised by rupture, contention and redirection is rife (Maddox "Disrupting"). Contention and redirection illustrate how competing agendas bump and grind to create a generative tension around a deep collective desire for social change. Contention often emerges within an environment of hacks and scams, of which there are many stories in the cryptocurrency world (see Bartlett for an example of OneCoin, for instance; Kavanagh, Miscione, and Ennis). Other aspects of contention emerge around how the technology works to produce (mint) cryptocurrencies, including concern over the environmental impact of producing cryptocurrencies (Goodkind, Jones, and Berrens) and the production of non-fungible tokens for the sale of digital assets (Howson). Contention also arises through the gendered social dynamics of brogramming culture skewing inclusive and diverse engagement (Bowles). Shifting from the ideal of inclusion to the actual practice of crypto-communities begs the question of whose futures are being made. Contention and redirections are also evidenced by ‘hard forks’ in cryptocurrency. The founder mystery resulted in the gifting of this technology to a decentralised and leaderless community, materialised through the distributed consensus processes to approve software updates to a cryptocurrency. This consensus system consequently holds within it the seeds for governance failures (Trump et al.), the first of which occurred with the ‘hard forking’ of Bitcoin into Bitcoin cash in 2017 (Webb). Hard forks occur when developers and miners no longer agree on a proposed change to the software: one group upgraded to the new software while the others operated on the old rules. The resulting two separate blockchains and digital currencies concretised the tensions and disagreements within the community. This forking resulted initially in a shock to the market value of, and trust in, the Bitcoin network, and the dilution of adoption networks across the two cryptocurrencies. The ongoing hard forks of Bitcoin Cash illustrate the continued contention occurring within the community as crypto-personalities pit against each other (Hankin; Li). As these examples show, not all experiments in cryptocurrencies are successful; some become obsolete through iteration (Arnold). Iteration engenders mutations in the cultural framing of socio-technical experiments. These mutations of meaning and signification then facilitate their absorption into novel futures, showing the ternary nature of how what happens in the dark works with what is known by the light. As a rhetorical device, cryptocurrencies have been referred to as a currency (a payment system) or a commodity (an investment or speculation vehicle; Nelms et al. 21). However, new potential applications for the underlying technologies continue emerge. For example, Ethereum, the second-most dominant cryptocurrency after Bitcoin, now offers smart contract technology (decentralised autonomous organisations, DAO; Kavanagh, Miscione, and Ennis) and is iterating technology to dramatically reduce the energy consumption required to mine and mint the non-fungible tokens (NFTs) associated with crypto art (Wintermeyer). Here we can see how these rhetorical framings may represent iterative shifts and meaning-mutation that is as pragmatic as it is cultural. While we have considered here the themes of obsolescence and iteration threaded through the technological differentiations amongst cryptocurrencies, what should we make of these rhetorical or cultural mutations? This cultural mutation, we argue, can be seen most clearly in the resurgence of Dogecoin. Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency launched in 2013 that takes its name and logo from a Shiba Inu meme that was popular several years ago (Potts and Berg). We can consider Dogecoin as a playful infrastructure (Rennie) and cultural product that was initially designed to provide a low bar for entry into the market. Its affordability is kept in place by the ability for miners to mint an unlimited number of coins. Dogecoin had a large resurgence of value and interest just after the meme-centric Reddit community Wallstreetbets managed to drive the share price of video game retailer GameStop to gain 1,500% (Potts and Berg). In this instance we see the mutation of a cryptocurrency into memecoin, or cultural product, for which the value is a prism to the wild fluctuations of internet culture itself, linking cultural bubbles to financial ones. In this case, technologies iterated in the dark mutated and surfaced as cultural bubbles through playful infrastructures that intersected with financial systems. The story of dogecoin articulates how cultural mutation articulates the absorption of emerging techno-potentials into larger structures. Conclusion From creative experiments digging in the dark shadows of global socio-economic forces, we can see how the future is formed beneath the surface of computational light. Yet as we write, cryptocurrencies are being absorbed by centralising and powerful entities to integrate them into global economies. Examples of large institutions hoarding Bitcoin include the crypto-counterbalancing between the Chinese state through its digital currency DCEP (Vincent) and Facebook through the Libra project. Vincent observes that the state-backed DCEP project is the antithesis of the decentralised community agenda for cryptocurrencies to enact the separation of state and money. 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Introduction: At the Crossroad Well, I’ve been an important pawn [in regeneration], for instance, changing doors and windows, enlarging them, eliminating shutters and thus having big open windows, light […] Then came the florist, through a common friend, who was the second huge pawn who trusted in this […] then came the pastry shop. (Alberto, 54, shop owner). Alberto is the owner of Pleasure Factory, one of two upmarket restaurants in a gentrifying crossroads area in northern Milan. He started buying apartments and empty stores in the 1980s, later becoming property manager of the building where he still lives. He also opened two restaurants, and then set up a neighbourhood commercial organisation. Alberto’s activities, and those of people like him, have been able to reverse the image and the usage of this public crossroad. This is something of which all of the involved actors are well aware. They have “bet,” as they say, and somehow “won” by changing people’s common understanding of, and approach to, this zone. This paper argues for the necessity of a closer look at the ways that place is produced through the multiple activities of small entrepreneurs and social actors, such as Alberto. This is because these activities represent the softer side of gentrification, and can create zones of pleasure and authenticity. Whilst market forces and multiple public interventions of gentrification’s “hard” side can lead to the displacement of people and uneven development, these softer zones of authenticity and pleasure have the power to shape the general neighbourhood brand (Atkinson 1830). Speaking rhetorically, these zones act as synecdoche for the surrounding environment. Places are in part built through the “atmosphere” that consumers seek throughout their daily routines. Following Gernot Böhme’s approach to spatial aesthetics, atmosphere can be viewed as the “relation between environmental qualities and human states” (114) and this relation is worked out daily in gentrified neighbourhoods. Not only do the passer-bys, local entrepreneurs, and sociologists contribute to the local making of atmosphere, but so does the production of the environmental qualities. These are the private and public interventions aimed at refurbishing, and somehow sanitising, specific zones of central neighbourhoods in order to make them suitable for middle class tastes (Julier 875). Not all gentrification processes are similar however, because of the unique influence of each city’s scalar rearrangements. The following section therefore briefly describes the changes in Milan in recent times. The paper will then describe the making of a zone of authentic pleasure at the Isola crossroads. I will show that soft gentrification happens through the making of specific zones where supply and demand match in ways that make for pleasant living. Milan, from Global to Local and Back Milan has a peculiar role in both the Italian and European contexts. Its metropolitan area, of 7.4 million inhabitants on a 12 000 km² surface, makes it the largest in Italy and the fifth in Europe (following Ruhr, Moscow, Paris and London). The municipal power has been pushing for a long-term strategy of population growth that would make Milan the “downtown” of the overall metropolitan area (Bricocoli and Savoldi 19), and take advantage of scalar rearrangements, such as State reconfigurations and setbacks. The overall goal of the government of Milan has been to increase the tax base and the local government’s political power. Milan also demonstrates the entrepreneurial turn adopted by many global cities, evident in the amount of project-based interventions, the involvement of international architecture studios (“La città della Moda” by Cesar Pelli; “Santa Giulia” by Norman Foster; “City-Life” and “the Fair” by Zaha Hadid and David Libeskind), and the hosting of mega-events, such as the Expo 2015. The Milan growth machine works then at different scales (global, national, city-region, neighbourhood) with several organisational actors involved, enormous investments and heavy political struggles to decide which coalition of winning actors will ride the tiger of uneven development. However, when we look at those transformations through the lens of the neighbourhood what we see is the making of zones within the larger texture of its streets and squares. This zone-making is similar to leopard’s spots within a contained urban space, it works for some time in specific streets and crossroads, then moves throughout the neighbourhood, as the process of gentrification goes on. The neighbourhood, which the zone of authentic pleasure I’m describing occurs, is called Isola (Island) because of its clustered shape between a railroad on the southern border and three major roads on the others. Isola was, until the 1980s, a working-class residential space with a strong tradition of left-wing political activism, with some small manufacturing businesses and minor commercial activities. This area remained quite removed from the overall urban development that radically shifted Milan towards a service economy in the 1960s and 1970s. However, during the 1980s and 1990s, the land price impacts of private activities and public policies in surrounding neighbourhoods increasingly pushed people and activities in the direction of Isola. Alberto explains this drift through the example of his first apartment: Just look at the evolution of my apartment. I bought it [in the 1980s] for 57 million lira, I remember, then sold it in 1992 for 160, then it was sold again for 200 000 euros, then four years ago for 250 000 and you have to understand that we’re talking about 47 square metres. If you consider the last price, 250 000, I’ll tell you that when I first came to the neighbourhood you could easily buy an entire building with that money. The building at number five in this street was entirely sold for 550 millions lira—you understand now why Isola is a huge real estate investment, people like it, its central, well served by the underground—well it still has to grow from a commercial standpoint… This evolution in land prices is clear when translated into the price for square metre: 2.4 euros for square meter in 1985, 3.4 in 1992, 4.2 in 2000 and 5.3 in 2006. The ratio increase is 120% in 20 years, demonstrating both the general boost in the economy of the area and also what is at stake within uneven development. What this paper argues is that parallel to this political economy dimension, which may be called the “hard side” of gentrification, there is also a “soft side” that deserves a closer attention. Pastry shops, cafés, bars, restaurants are as strategic as real estate investments (Zukin, Landscapes 195). The spatial concept that best captures the rationale of these activities is the zone, meaning a small and localised cluster of activities. I chose to add the features of pleasure and authenticity because of the role they play in ordinary consumption practices. In order to illustrate the specific relevance of soft gentrification I will now turn to the description of the Isola crossroad, a place that has been re-created through the interventions of several actors, such as Alberto above, and also Franca and her pastry shop. A Zone of Authentic Pleasure: Franca’s Pleasure Corner We’re walking through a small residential street and arrive at a crossroad. We turn to look to the four corners, one is occupied by a public school building, the second and the third by upmarket restaurants, and the last by a “typical” Sicilian pastry shop and café. We decide to enter here, find a seat and order a coffee together with a small cassata, a cake made with sweet cheese, almonds, pistachios and candied fruit. While we are experiencing this southern Italian breakfast at some thousand miles of spatial distance from its original site, a short man enters. He’s a well renowned TV comedian, best known for his would-be-magician gags. Everybody in the café recognises him but pretends to ignore his presence, he buys some pastries and leaves. Other customers come and go. The shop owner, an Italian lady in her forties called Franca, approaches to me and declares: “as you can see for yourself, we see elegant people here.” In this kind of neighbourhood it is common to see and share space with such “elegant” and well-known people, and to feel that a pleasant atmosphere is created through this public display. Franca opened the pastry shop three years ago, a short time after the upmarket restaurants on the other corners. However, when we interviewed her she wasn’t yet satisfied with the atmosphere: “when I go downtown and come back, I feel depressed … it’s developing but still has not grown enough … Isn’t one of the classic rich places in Milan—it’s kind of a weird place.” Through these and other similar statements she expressed a feeling of delusion toward the neighbourhood—a feeling on which she’s building her tale—that emerged in contrast to the kind of environment Franca would consider more apt for her shop. Franca’s a newcomer, but knows that the neighbourhood has been “sanitised.” “It really was a criminal area” she states, using overtly derogatory terms just like they were neutral: “riffraff” for the customers of ordinary bars, “dull” for the northern part of the neighbourhood where “there even are kebab shops.” In contrast she lists her beloved customers: journalists, architects, two tenors, people working at the theatre nearby, and the local TV celebrity described earlier. When she refers to the crossroad she speaks of it as, “maybe the gem of the neighbourhood.” At some point she declares what makes her proud: A place like this regenerates the neighbourhood—to be sure, if I ever open a harbour bar I’d attract riffraff who would discredit the place. In short it’s not, to make an example, a club where you play cards, that bring in the underworld, noise, nuisance—here the customer is the typical middle class, all right people. The term “all right people” reoccurs in several of Franca’s statements. Her initial economic sacrifices, relative though if, as she says, she’s able to open another shop in a more central place (“we would like to become a chain-store”), are now compensated by the recognition she gets from her more polished clients. She also expresses a personal satisfaction in the role she has played in the changes in Isola: “until now it’s just a matter of personal satisfaction—of seeing, I’ve built this stuff.” Franca’s story demonstrates that the soft side of gentrification is also produced by individuals that have little in common with the huge capital investment that is at stake in real estate development, or the chain stores that are also opening in the neighbourhood. In one way, Franca is alone in her quest for regeneration, as most entrepreneurs are. In another way, though, she is not. Not only is she participating in the “upgrading” together with other small business owners and consumers who all agree on the direction to follow, thus building together a zone of authentic pleasure, but she can also rely on a “critical infrastructure” of architects, designers and consultants (Zukin, Landscapes 202) that knows perfectly how to do the job. With much pride in her interior design choices, Franca pointed out how her café mixes chic with classic and opposing them to a flashy and folk décor. She showed us the black-and-white pictures at the wall depicting Paris in the 1960s, the unique design coffee machine model she owns, and the flower vases conceived by a famous designer and filled by her neighbour florist. The colours chosen for the interior are orange, tied to oranges—a typical product of Sicily, whereas the brown colour relates to the land, and the gold is linked to elegance. The mixing of warm colours, Franca explained, makes the atmosphere cosy. Where did this owner get all these idea(l)s? Franca relied on an Italian interior design studio, which works at a global scale furnishing hotels, restaurants, bars, shops, bathing establishments, and airports in New York, Barcelona, Paris, and Milan. The architect with whom she dealt with let her “work together” in order to have an autonomous set of choices that match the brand’s offer. Authenticity thus becomes part of the décor in a systematic way, and the feeling of a pleasant atmosphere is constantly reproduced through the daily routines of consumption. Again, not alone in the regeneration process but feeling as if she is “on her own,” Franca struggles daily to protect the atmosphere she’s building: “My point is avoiding having kids or tramps as customers—I don’t want an indiscriminate presence, like people coming here for a glass of wine and maybe getting drunk. I mean, this is not the place to come and have a bianchino [cheap white wine]. People coming here have a spumante, and behave in a completely different fashion.” The opposition between a bianchino, the cheap white wine, and the spumante is one that clarifies the moral boundary between the targets of soft gentrification. In Italian popular culture, and especially in the past, it was a common male habit to have bianchino from late morning onwards. Bars therefore served as gendered public spaces where common people would rest from working activities and the family sphere. Franca, together with many new bars and cafes that construct zones of authentic pleasure in gentrifying neighbourhoods, is trying to update this cultural practice. The spumante adds a sparkling element to consumption and is branded as a trendy aperitif wine, which appeals to younger tastes and lifestyles. By utilising a global design studio, Franca connects to global patterns of urban development and the homogenising of local atmospheres. Furthermore, by preferencing different consumption behaviours she contributes to the social transformation of the neighbourhood by selecting customers. This tendency towards segregation, rather than mixing, is a relevant feature here, since the Franca’s favourite clientele are clearly “people like us” (Butler 2469). Zones like the one described above are thus places where uneven development shows its social, interactive and public façade. Pleasure and Authenticity in Soft Gentrification The production of “atmosphere” in a gentrifying neighbourhood goes together with customers’ taste and preferences. The supply-side of building the environmental landscape for a “pleasant” zone needs a demand-side, consumers buying, supporting, and appreciating the outcome of the activities of business people like Franca. The two are one, most of the time, because tastes and preferences are linked to class, gender, and ethnicity, which makes a sort of mutual redundancy. To put it abruptly: similar people, spending their time in the same places and in a similar way. As I have shown above, the pastry shop owner Franca went for mixing chic and classic in her interior design. That is distinctiveness and familiarity, individualisation and commonality in one unique environment. Seen from the consumer’s perspective, this leads to what has been depicted by Sharon Zukin in her account of the crisis of authenticity in New York. People, she says, are yearning for authenticity because this: reflects the separation between our experience of space and our sense of self that is so much a part of modern mentalities. Though we think authenticity refers to a neighbourhood’s innate qualities, it really expresses our own anxieties about how places change. The idea of authenticity is important because it connects our individual yearning to root ourselves in a singular time and place to a cosmic grasp or larger social forces that remake our world from many small and often invisible actions. (220) Among the “many small and invisible actions” are the ones made by Franca and the global interior design firm she hired, but also those done daily by her customers. For instance, Christian a young advertising executive who lives two blocks away from the pastry shop. He defines himself an “executive creative director” [in English, while the interview was in Italian]. Asked on cooking practices and the presentation he makes to his guests, he declares that the main effort is on: The mise en place—the mise en place with no doubt. The mise en place must be appropriate to what you’re doing. Sometimes you get the mise en place simply serving a plateau, when you correctly couple cheese and salami, even better when you couple fresh cheese with vegetables or you give a slightly creative touch with some fruit salad, like seitan with avocado, no? They become beautiful to see and the mise en place saves it, the aesthetics does its job …Do you feel there are foods, beverages or consumption occasions you consider not worth giving up at all? The only thing I wouldn’t give up is going out in the morning, and having a cappuccino down there in the tiny pastry shop and having some brioches while I’m at the bar. Those that are not frozen beforehand but cooked just in time and have a breakfast, for just two euros, two euros and ten […] cappuccino and fresh brioche, baked just then, otherwise I cannot even think—if I’m in Milan I hardly think correctly—I mean I can’t wake up really without a good cappuccino and a good brioche. Christian is one of the new residents that was attracted to this neighbourhood because of the benefits of its uneven development: relatively affordable rent prices, services, and atmosphere. Commonality is among them, but also distinctiveness. Each morning he can have his “good cappuccino and good brioche” freshly baked to suit his taste and that allows him to differentiate between other brioches, namely the industrialised ones, those “frozen beforehand.” More importantly, he can do this by simply crossing the street and entering one of the pleasure zones that are making Isola, there and now, the new gentrified Milanese neighbourhood. Zones of Authentic Pleasure In this paper I have argued that a closer attention to the softer side of gentrification can help to understand how taste and uneven development mesh together, to produce the common shape we find in gentrified neighbourhoods. These typical urban spaces are made of streets, sidewalks, squares, and walls, but also shop windows and signs, pavement cafés, planters, and the street-life that turns around all of this. Both built environment and interaction produces the atmosphere of authentic pleasure, which is offered by local entrepreneurs and sought by the people who go there. Pleasure is a central feature because of the increasing role of consumption activities in the city and the role of individual consumption practices. I f we observe closely the local scale where all of these practices take place, we can clearly distinguish one zone from another because of their localised effervescence. Neighbourhoods are not equally affected by gentrification. Internally specific zones emerge as those having the capacity to subsume the entire process. These are the ones I have described in this paper—zones of authentic pleasure, where the supply and demand for an authentic distinctive and communal atmosphere takes place. Ephemeral spaces; if one looks at the political economy of place through a macro lens. But if the aim is to understand why certain zones prove to be successful and others not, then exploring how soft gentrification is daily produced and consumed is fundamental.Acknowledgments This article draws on data produced by the research team for the CSS project ‘Middle Class and Consumption: Boundaries, Standards and Discourses’. The team comprised Marco Santoro, Roberta Sassatelli and Giovanni Semi (Coordinators), Davide Caselli, Federica Davolio, Paolo Magaudda, Chiara Marchetti, Federico Montanari and Francesca Pozzi (Research Fellows). The ethnographic data on Milan were mainly produced by Davide Caselli and by the Author. The author wishes to thank the anonymous referees for wise and kind remarks and Michelle Hall for editing and suggestions. References Atkinson, Rowland. “Domestication by Cappuccino or a Revenge on Urban Space? Control and Empowerment in the Management of Public Spaces.” Urban Studies 40.9 (2003): 1829–1843. Böhme, Gernot. “Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics.” Thesis Eleven 36 (1993): 113–126. Bricocoli, Massimo, and Savoldi Paola. Milano Downtown: Azione Pubblica e Luoghi dell’Abitare. Milano: et al./Edizioni, 2010. Butler, Tim. “Living in the Bubble: Gentrification and Its ‘Others’ in North London.” Urban Studies 40.12 (2003): 2469–2486. Julier, Guy. “Urban Designscapes and the Production of Aesthetic Consent.” Urban Studies 42.5/6 (2005): 869–887. Zukin, Sharon. Landscapes of Power. From Detroit to Disney World. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991. ———. Naked City. The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places. New York: Oxford UP, 2010.

IntroductionTraditionally, the femme fatale has been closely associated with a series of noir films (such as Double Indemnity [1944], The Maltese Falcon [1941], and The Big Heat [1953]) in the 1940s and 50s that necessarily betray male anxieties about independent women in the years during and following World War II. However, the anxieties and historical factors that precipitated the emergence of the noir femme fatale similarly existed in the sixteenth century and, as a result, the femme fatale can be re-imagined in a series of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. In this context, to re-imagine is to imagine or conceive of something in a new way. It involves taking a concept or an idea and re-imagining it into something simultaneously similar and new. This article will argue, first, that the noir femme fatale’s emergence coincided with a period of history characterised by suspicion, intolerance and perceived vulnerability and that a similar set of historical factors—namely the presence of a female monarch and changes to marriage laws—precipitated the emergence a femme fatale type figure in the Renaissance period. Second, noir films typically contain a series of narrative tropes that can be similarly identified in a selection of Renaissance plays, which enables the production of a new, re-imagined reading of these plays as tragedies of the feminine desire for autonomy. The femme fatale, according to Rebecca Stott, is not unique to the twentieth century. The femme fatale label can be applied retrospectively to seductive, if noticeably evil women, whose seduction and destruction of men render them amenable to our twenty-first century understanding of the femme fatale (Allen). Mario Praz similarly contends that the femme fatale has always existed; she simply becomes more prolific in times of social and cultural upheaval. The definition of the femme fatale, however, has only recently been added to the dictionary and the burden of all definitions is the same: the femme fatale is a woman who lures men into danger, destruction and even death by means of her overpowering seductive charms. There is a woman on the Renaissance stage who combines adultery, murder, and insubordination and this figure embodies the same characteristics as the twentieth-century femme fatale because she is similarly drawn from an archetypal pattern of male anxieties regarding sexually appetitive/desirous women. The fear that this selection of women elicit arises invariably from their initial defiance of their fathers and/or brothers in marrying without their consent and/or the possibility that these women may marry or seek a union with a man out of sexual lust.The femme fatale of 1940s and 50s noir films is embodied by such women as Brigid O’Shaughnessy (Maltese Falcon), Phyllis Dietrichson (Double Indemnity), and Ann Grayle (Murder, My Sweet), while the figure of the femme fatale can be re-imagined in a series of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, including The Changeling (1622), Arden of Faversham (1592), and The Maid’s Tragedy (1619). Like the noir femme fatale, there is a female protagonist in each of these plays who uses both cunning and sexual attractiveness to gain her desired independence. By focusing on one noir film and one Renaissance play, this article will explore both the historical factors that precipitate the emergence of these fatal women and the structural tropes that are common to both Double Indemnity and Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling. The obvious parallels between the two figures at the centre of these narratives—Phyllis and Beatrice-Joanna respectively—namely an aversion to the institution of marriage and the instigation of murder to attain one’s desires, enable a re-imagined reading of Beatrice-Joanna as a femme fatale. Socio-Cultural AnxietiesThe femme fatale is a component of changing consciousness: she is one of the recurring motifs of the film noir genre and takes her place amongst degeneration anxieties, anxieties about sexuality and race and concerns about cultural virility and fitness (Stott). According to Sylvia Harvey, the emergence of the femme fatale parallels social changes taking place in the 1940s, particularly the increasing entry of women into the labour market. She also notes the apparent frustration of the institution of the family in this era and the boredom and stifling entrapment of marriage and how the femme fatale threatens to destroy traditional family structures. Jans Wager likewise notes that the femme fatale emerged as an expression of the New Woman, whose presence in the public sphere was in opposition to her adherence to traditional societal values, while Virginia Allen argues that the femme fatale came to maturity in the years marked by the first birth control campaigns and female emancipation movement. The Renaissance femme fatale similarly emerged in the wake of historical trigger factors occurring at the time, namely the presence of a female monarch and changes to marriage laws. In 1558, Queen Elizabeth I assumed the throne, which had a profound impact upon relations of gender in English Renaissance society. She occupied a privileged position of power in a society that believed women should have none by virtue of their inferior sex (Montrose). This was compounded by her decision to remain unmarried, which ensured the consolidation of her power that she would have otherwise forfeited to her husband. The presence of a female ruler destabilised established notions of women as passive objects of desire and, as I argue here, contributed to representations of powerful women in Renaissance drama. Men created femme fatales in their work as an expression of what they saw in women who were beginning to declare their sexual and political freedom. In addition, changing conceptions of marriage from arranged practices (unions for social and economic reasons) to romantic idealism (marriage for companionship and affective ties) saw the legitimation of desire outside the holy sacrament. Plays depicting femme fatales, including The Changeling (1622), Arden of Faversham (1592) and The Maid’s Tragedy (1619) to name a few, appear to have fed off the anxieties that resulted from the shift from arranged marriages to individual choice of a spouse. Similarly, in the noir period, “restrictions on women’s rights ensured that married women had comparatively fewer rights than single women, who could at least lay claim to their own property and wages” (Braun 53). As such, the femme fatale represented an alternative to domesticity, one in which a woman could retain her dignity without a man.Re-imagining the Femme Fatale James Damico proposes a model of film noir’s plot structure and character type. The male protagonist is hired for a job associated with a non-innocent woman to whom he is sexually and fatally attracted to. Through his attraction, either because the woman induces him to it or because it is a natural result of their relationship, the man comes to cheat, attempt to or actually murder a second man to whom a woman is unhappily or unwillingly attached (generally her husband or lover). This act invariably leads to the woman’s betrayal of the protagonist and either metaphorically or literally results in the destruction of the woman, the man to whom she is attached, and the protagonist himself. In Double Indemnity, Phyllis Dietrichson lures her hapless lover, Walter Neff, into committing murder on her behalf. He puts up minimal resistance to Phyllis’s plan to insure her husband without his knowledge so that he can be killed and she can reap the benefits of the policy. Walter says, “I fought it [the idea of murder], only I guess I didn’t fight it hard enough.” Similarly, in The Changeling, Beatrice-Joanna’s father, Vermandero, arranges her marriage to Alonzo de Piracquo; however, she is in love with Alsemero, who would also be a suitable match if Alonzo were out of the way. She thus employs the use of her servant DeFlores to kill her intended. He does as instructed and brings back her dead fiancée’s finger as proof of the deed, expecting for his services a sexual reward, rather than the gold Beatrice-Joanna offered him: “Never was man / Dearlier rewarded” (2.2.138-140). Renaissance fears regarding women’s desirous subjectivity are justified in this scene, which represent Beatrice-Joanna as willingly succumbing to DeFlore’s advances: she came to “love anon” what she had previously “fear’st and faint’st to venture on” (3.4.171-172). She experienced a “giddy turning in [her]” (1.1.159), which compelled her to seduce DeFlores on the eve of her wedding to Alsemero. Both Phyllis and Beatrice-Joanna localise contemporary fears and fantasies about women, sexuality and marriage (Haber) and, despite the existing literature surrounding the noir femme fatale, a re-imagining of this figure on the Renaissance stage is unique. Furthermore, and in addition to similarities in plot structure, noir films are typically characterised by three narrative tropes (masquerade, the polarisation of the femme fatale with the femme attrappe and the demise of the femme fatale) that are likewise present in The Changeling. 1. Masquerade: Her Sexual Past Is the Central Mystery of the Narrative The femme fatale appropriates the signifiers of femininity (modesty, obedience, silence) that bewitch men and fool them into believing that she embodies everything he desires. According to Luce Irigaray, the femme fatale assumes an unnatural, flaunted facade and, in so doing, she conceals her own subjectivity and disrupts notions of what she is really like. Her sexual past is often the central mystery and so she figuratively embodies the hidden secrets of feminine sexuality while the males battle for control over this knowledge (Lee-Hedgecock). John Caleb-Hopkins characterises Phyllis as a faux housewife because of her rejection of the domestic, her utilisation of the role to further her agency, and her method of deception via gender performance. It is “faux” because she plays the role as a means to achieve her monetary or material desires. When Phyllis first meets Walter she plays up the housewife routine because she immediately recognises his potential utility for her. The house is not a space in which she belongs but a space she can utilise to further her agency and so she devises a plan to dethrone and remove the patriarch from his position within the home. Walter, as the last patriarchal figure in her vicinity to interfere with the pursuit of her desire, must be killed as well. Beatrice-Joanna’s masquerade of femininity (“there was a visor / O’er that cunning face” [5.3.46-7]) and her performance as a chaste virgin to please Alsemero, suggests that she possesses an ineffaceable knowledge that femininity is a construction that women put on for men. Having surrendered her virginity to DeFlores prior to marrying Alsemero, she agonises that he will find out: “Never was bride so fearfully distressed […] There’s no venturing / Into his bed […] Without my shame” (4.1.2-13). Fortunately, she discovers a manuscript (the Book of Experiments) that documents “How to know whether a woman be a maid or not” (4.1.41). Having discovered the book and potions, Beatrice-Joanna persuades her waiting-woman Diaphanta to take the potions so that she can witness its effects and mimic them as necessary. Thus instructed, Beatrice-Joanna is equipped with the ability to feign the symptoms of virginity, which leads us to the notion of female masquerade as a means to evade the male gaze by feigning virtue and thus retaining her status as desirable to men. Her masquerade conceals her sexual experience and hides the truth of female deceitfulness from the men in the play, which makes manifest the theme of women’s unknowability. 2. Femme Fatale versus Femme AttrappeThe original source of the femme fatale is the dark half of the dualistic concept of the Eternal Feminine: the Mary/Eve dichotomy (Allen). In film noir, the female characters fall into one of two categories—the femme fatale or woman as redeemer. Unlike the femme fatale, the femme attrappe is the known, familiar and comfortable other, who is juxtaposed to the unknown, devious and deceptive other. According to Jans Wager both women are trapped by patriarchal authority—the femme fatale by her resistance and the good wife by her acquiescence. These two women invariably appear side-by-side in order to demonstrate acceptable womanhood in the case of the femme attrappe and dangerous and unacceptable displays of femininity in the case of the femme fatale. In Double Indemnity, Phyllis is an obvious example of the latter. She flirts brazenly with Walter while introducing the idea of insuring her husband and when he finally kills her husband, she stares unflinchingly ahead and continues driving, showing very little remorse after the murder. Lola (Phyllis’s step-daughter and the film’s femme attrappe) functions as a foil to Phyllis. “Lola’s narrative purpose is to provide a female character to contrast with Phyllis to further depict her femininity as bad […] The more Lola is emphatically stressed as victim through Walter’s narration, the more vilified Phyllis is” (Caleb-Hopkins). Lola presents a type of femininity that patriarchy approves of and necessitates. Phyllis is the antithesis to this because her sexuality is provocative and open and she uses it to manipulate those around her (Caleb-Hopkins). It is Lola who eventually tells Walter that Phyllis murdered her mother and that her former boyfriend Nino has been spotted at Phyllis’s house most nights. This leads Walter to conclude, logically, that she is arranging for Nino to kill him as well (Maxfield). The Renaissance subplot heroine has been juxtaposed, here, with the deadly woman at the center of the play, thus supporting a common structural trope of the film noir genre in which the femme attrappe and femme fatale exist alongside each other. In The Changeling, Isabella and Beatrice-Joanna occupy these positions respectively. In the play’s subplot, Alibius employs his servant Lollio to watch over his wife Isabella while he is away and, ironically, it is Lollio himself who attempts to seduce Isabella. He offers himself to her as a “most shrewd temptation” (1.2.57); however, unlike Beatrice-Joanna, who engages in a lascivious affair with another man, Isabella remains faithful to her husband. In so doing, Beatrice-Joanna’s status as a femme fatale is exemplified. She is represented as a woman who cannot control her desires and will resort to any and all means necessary to get what she wants. 3. The Femme Fatale’s Demise The femme fatale is characterised by the two-fold possession of desire: desire for autonomy and self-government and the desire for death. Her quest for freedom, which is only available in death, explains the femme fatale’s desire to self-destruct in these plays, which guarantees that she will never deviate from the course she alighted on even if that path leads inevitably to her demise. According to Elizabeth Bronfen, “the choice between freedom and death inevitably requires that one choose death because there you show that you have freedom of choice. She undertakes an act that allows her to choose death as a way of choosing real freedom by turning the inevitability of her fate into her responsibility” (2004).The femme fatale will never show her true intentions to anyone, especially not the hero she has inveigled, even if it entails his and her own death (Bronfen). In Double Indemnity, Phyllis, by choosing not to shoot Walter the second time, performs an act in which she actively accepts her own fallibility: “I never loved you Walter. Not you or anybody else. I’m rotten to the heart. I used you just as you said. That’s all you ever meant to me. Until a minute ago, when I couldn’t fire that second shot.” This is similarly the case with Beatrice-Joanna who, only at the very end, admits to the murder of Alonzo—“Your love has made me / A cruel murd’ress” (5.3.64-5)—in order to get the man she wanted. According to Bronfen, the femme fatale turns what is inevitable into a source of power. She does not contest the murder charge because a guilty verdict and punishment of death will grant her the freedom she has sought unwaveringly since the beginning of the play. Both Beatrice-Joanna and Phyllis apprehend that there is no appropriate outlet for their unabashed independence. Their unions, with Alsemero and Walter respectively, will nevertheless require their subjection in the patriarchal institution of monogamous marriage. The destruction of the sanctity of marriage in Double Indemnity and The Changeling inevitably results in placing the relationship of the lovers under strain, beyond the boundaries of conventional moral law, to the extent that the adulterous relationship becomes an impossibility that invariably results in the mutual destruction of both parties. ConclusionThe plays of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period, like the noir films of the 1940s and 50s, lament a lost past when women accepted their subordination without reproach and anxiously anticipated a future in which women refused submission to men and masculine forms of authority (Born-Lechleitner). While the femme fatale is commonly associated with the noir era, this article has argued that a series of historical factors and socio-cultural anxieties in the Renaissance period allow for a re-imagined reading of the femme fatale on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. In The Changeling, Middleton and Rowley foreground contemporary cultural anxieties by fleshing out the lusty details that confirm Beatrice-Joanna’s status a female villainess. Throughout the play we come to understand the ideologies that dictate the manner of her representation. That is, early modern anxieties regarding the independent, sexually appetitive woman manifested in representations of a female figure on the Renaissance stage who can be re-imagined as a femme fatale.ReferencesAllen, Virginia M. The Femme Fatale: Erotic Icon. New York: Whitson Publishing Company, 1983. Born-Lechleitner, Ilse. The Motif of Adultery in Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline Tragedy. New York: Edwin Hellen Press, 1995.Braun, Heather. The Rise and Fall of the Femme Fatale in British Literature, 1790-1910. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2012. Bronfen, Elizabeth. “Femme Fatale: Negotiations of Tragic Desire.” New Literary History 35.1 (2004): 103–16. Caleb-Hopkins, John. “There’s No Place like Home … Anymore: Domestic Masquerade and Faux-Housewife Femme Fatale in Barbara Stanwyck’s Early 1940s Films.” Masters thesis. Canada: Carleton University, 2014.Damico, James. “Film Noir: A Modest Proposal.” Film Noir Reader. Eds. Alain Silver and James Ursini. New York: Limelight, 1996.Double Indemnity. Billy Wilder. Paramount Pictures, 1944.Haber, Judith. “I(t) Could Not Choose But Follow: Erotic Logic in The Changeling.” Representations 81.18 (2003): 79–98. Harvey, Sylivia. “Woman’s Place: The Absent Family of Film Noir.” Women in Film Noir. Ed. A. Kaplan. London: British Film Institute, 1978. Irigaray, Luce. The Sex Which Is Not One. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985.Lee-Hedgecock, Jennifer. The Sexual Threat and Danger of the Femme Fatale in Victorian Literature. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 2005. Montrose, Louis. The Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender, and Representation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006.Maxfield, James F. The Fatal Woman: Sources of Male Anxiety in American Film Noir. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1996.Praz, Mario. The Romantic Agony. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1951 [1933]. Stott, Rebecca. The Fabrication of the Late-Victorian Femme Fatale. London: Macmillan Press, 1992.Wager, Jans B. Dangerous Dames: Women and Representation in the Weimar Street Film and Film Noir. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1999.

Image 1: A Little Free Library. Image credit: Nadine Kozak.IntroductionLittle Free Libraries give people a reason to stop and exchange things they love: books. It seemed like a really good way to build a sense of community.Dannette Lank, Little Free Library steward, Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, 2013 (Rumage)Against a backdrop of stagnant literacy rates and enduring perceptions of urban decay and the decline of communities in cities (NCES, “Average Literacy”; NCES, “Average Prose”; Putnam 25; Skogan 8), legions of Little Free Libraries (LFLs) have sprung up across the United States between 2009 and the present. LFLs are small, often homemade structures housing books and other physical media for passersby to choose a book to take or leave a book to share with others. People have installed the structures in front of homes, schools, libraries, churches, fire and police stations, community gardens, and in public parks. There are currently 50,000 LFLs around the world, most of which are in the continental United States (Aldrich, “Big”). LFLs encompass building in multiple senses of the term; LFLs are literally tiny buildings to house books and people use the structures for building neighbourhood social capital. The organisation behind the movement cites “building community” as one of its three core missions (Little Free Library). Rowan Moore, theorising humans’ reasons for building, argues desire and emotion are central (16). The LFL movement provides evidence for this claim: stewards erect LFLs based on hope for increased literacy and a desire to build community through their altruistic actions. This article investigates how LFLs build urban community and explores barriers to the endeavour, specifically municipal building and right of way ordinances used in attempts to eradicate the structures. It also examines local responses to these municipal actions and potential challenges to traditional public libraries brought about by LFLs, primarily the decrease of visits to public libraries and the use of LFLs to argue for defunding of publicly provided library services. The work argues that LFLs build community in some places but may threaten other community services. This article employs qualitative content analysis of 261 stewards’ comments about their registered LFLs on the organisation’s website drawn from the two largest cities in a Midwestern state and an interview with an LFL steward in a village in the same state to analyse how LFLs build community. The two cities, located in the state where the LFL movement began, provide a cross section of innovators, early adopters, and late adopters of the book exchanges, determined by their registered charter numbers. Press coverage and municipal documents from six cities across the US gathered through a snowball sample provide data about municipal challenges to LFLs. Blog posts penned by practising librarians furnish some opinions about the movement. This research, while not a representative sample, identifies common themes and issues around LFLs and provides a basis for future research.The act of building and curating an LFL is a representation of shared beliefs about literacy, community, and altruism. Establishing an LFL is an act of civic participation. As Nico Carpentier notes, while some civic participation is macro, carried out at the level of the nation, other participation is micro, conducted in “the spheres of school, family, workplace, church, and community” (17). Ruth H. Landman investigates voluntary activities in the city, including community gardening, and community bakeries, and argues that the people associated with these projects find themselves in a “denser web of relations” than previously (2). Gretchen M. Herrmann argues that neighbourhood garage sales, although fleeting events, build an enduring sense of community amongst participants (189). Ray Oldenburg contends that people create associational webs in what he calls “great good places”; third spaces separate from home and work (20-21). Little Free Libraries and Community BuildingEmotion plays a central role in the decision to become an LFL steward, the person who establishes and maintains the LFL. People recount their desire to build a sense of community and share their love of reading with neighbours (Charter 4684; Charter 8212; Charter 9437; Charter 9705; Charter 16561). One steward in the study reported, “I love books and I want to be able to help foster that love in our neighbourhood as well” (Charter 4369). Image 2: A Little Free Library, bench, water fountain, and dog’s water bowl for passersby to enjoy. Image credit: Nadine Kozak.Relationships and emotional ties are central to some people’s decisions to have an LFL. The LFL website catalogues many instances of memorial LFLs, tributes to librarians, teachers, and avid readers. Indeed, the first Little Free Library, built by Todd Bol in 2009, was a tribute to his late mother, a teacher who loved reading (“Our History”). In the two city study area, ten LFLs are memorials, allowing bereaved families to pass on a loved one’s penchant for sharing books and reading (Charter 1235; Charter 1309; Charter 4604; Charter 6219; Charter 6542; Charter 6954; Charter 10326; Charter 16734; Charter 24481; Charter 30369). In some cases, urban neighbours come together to build, erect, and stock LFLs. One steward wrote: “Those of us who live in this friendly neighborhood collaborated to design[,] build and paint a bungalow themed library” to match the houses in the neighbourhood (Charter 2532). Another noted: “Our neighbor across the street is a skilled woodworker, and offered to build the library for us if we would install it in our yard and maintain it. What a deal!” (Charter 18677). Community organisations also install and maintain LFLs, including 21 in the study population (e.g. Charter 31822; Charter 27155).Stewards report increased communication with neighbours due to their LFLs. A steward noted: “We celebrated the library’s launch on a Saturday morning with neighbors of all ages. We love sitting on our front porch and catching up with the people who stop to check out the books” (Charter 9673). Another exclaimed:within 24 hours, before I had time to paint it, my Little Free Library took on a life of its own. All of a sudden there were lots of books in it and people stopping by. I wondered where these books came from as I had not put any in there. Little kids in the neighborhood are all excited about it and I have met neighbors that I had never seen before. This is going to be fun! (Charter 15981)LFLs build community through social interaction and collaboration. This occurs when neighbours come together to build, install, and fill the structures. The structures also open avenues for conversation between neighbours who had no connection previously. Like Herrmann’s neighbourhood garage sales, LFLs create and maintain social ties between neighbours and link them by the books they share. Additionally, when neighbours gather and communicate at the LFL structure, they create a transitory third space for “informal public life”, where people can casually interact at a nearby location (Oldenburg 14, 288).Building Barriers, Creating CommunityThe erection of an LFL in an urban neighbourhood is not, however, always a welcome sight. The news analysis found that LFLs most often come to the attention of municipal authorities via citizen complaints, which lead to investigations and enforcement of ordinances. In Kansas, a neighbour called an LFL an “eyesore” and an “illegal detached structure” (Tapper). In Wisconsin, well-meaning future stewards contacted their village authorities to ask about rules, inadvertently setting off a six-month ban on LFLs (Stingl; Rumage). Resulting from complaints and inquiries, municipalities regulated, and in one case banned, LFLs, thus building barriers to citizens’ desires to foster community and share books with neighbours.Municipal governments use two major areas of established code to remove or prohibit LFLs: ordinances banning unapproved structures in residents’ yards and those concerned with obstructions to right of ways when stewards locate the LFLs between the public sidewalk and street.In the first instance, municipal ordinances prohibit either front yard or detached structures. Controversies over these ordinances and LFLs erupted in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, in 2012; Leawood, Kansas, in 2014; Shreveport, Louisiana, in 2015; and Dallas, Texas, in 2015. The Village of Whitefish Bay banned LFLs due to an ordinance prohibiting “front yard structures,” including mailboxes (Sanburn; Stingl). In Leawood, the city council argued that an LFL, owned by a nine-year-old boy, violated an ordinance that forbade the construction of any detached structures without city council permission. In Shreveport, the stewards of an LFL received a cease and desist letter from city council for having an “accessory structure” in the front yard (LaCasse; Burris) and Dallas officials knocked on a steward’s front door, informing her of a similar breach (Kellogg).In the second instance, some urban municipalities argued that LFLs are obstructions that block right of ways. In Lincoln, Nebraska, the public works director noted that the city “uses the area between the sidewalk and the street for snow storage in the winter, light poles, mailboxes, things like that.” The director continued: “And I imagine these little libraries are meant to congregate people like a water cooler, but we don’t want people hanging around near the road by the curb” (Heady). Both Lincoln in 2014 and Los Angeles (LA), California, in 2015, cited LFLs for obstructions. In Lincoln, the city notified the Southminster United Methodist Church that their LFL, located between the public sidewalk and street, violated a municipal ordinance (Sanburn). In LA, the Bureau of Street Services notified actor Peter Cook that his LFL, situated in the right of way, was an “obstruction” that Cook had to remove or the city would levy a fine (Moss). The city agreed at a hearing to consider a “revocable permit” for Cook’s LFL, but later denied its issuance (Condes).Stewards who found themselves in violation of municipal ordinances were able to harness emotion and build outrage over limits to individuals’ ability to erect LFLs. In Kansas, the stewards created a Facebook page, Spencer’s Little Free Library, which received over 31,000 likes and messages of support. One comment left on the page reads: “The public outcry will force those lame city officials to change their minds about it. Leave it to the stupid government to rain on everybody’s parade” (“Good”). Children’s author Daniel Handler sent a letter to the nine-year-old steward, writing as Lemony Snicket, “fighting against librarians is immoral and useless in the face of brave and noble readers such as yourself” (Spencer’s). Indeed, the young steward gave a successful speech to city hall arguing that the body should allow the structures because “‘lots of people in the neighborhood used the library and the books were always changing. I think it’s good for Leawood’” (Bauman). Other local LFL supporters also attended council and spoke in favour of the structures (Harper). In LA, Cook’s neighbours started a petition that gathered over 100 signatures, where people left comments including, “No to bullies!” (Lopez). Additionally, neighbours gathered to discuss the issue (Dana). In Shreveport, neighbours left stacks of books in their front yards, without a structure housing them due to the code banning accessory structures. One noted, “I’m basically telling the [Metropolitan Planning Commission] to go sod off” (Friedersdorf; Moss). LFL proponents reacted with frustration and anger at the perceived over-reach of the government toward harmless LFLs. In addition to the actions of neighbours and supporters, the national and local press commented on the municipal constraints. The LFL movement has benefitted from a significant amount of positive press in its formative years, a press willing to publicise and criticise municipal actions to thwart LFL development. Stewards’ struggles against municipal bureaucracies building barriers to LFLs makes prime fodder for the news media. Herbert J. Gans argues an enduring value in American news is “the preservation of the freedom of the individual against the encroachments of nation and society” (50). The juxtaposition of well-meaning LFL stewards against municipal councils and committees provided a compelling opportunity to illustrate this value.National media outlets, including Time (Sanburn), Christian Science Monitor (LaCasse), and The Atlantic, drew attention to the issue. Writing in The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf critically noted:I wish I was writing this to merely extol this trend [of community building via LFLs]. Alas, a subset of Americans are determined to regulate every last aspect of community life. Due to selection bias, they are overrepresented among local politicians and bureaucrats. And so they have power, despite their small-mindedness, inflexibility, and lack of common sense so extreme that they’ve taken to cracking down on Little Free Libraries, of all things. (Friedersdorf, n.p.)Other columnists mirrored this sentiment. Writing in the LA Times, one commentator sarcastically wrote that city officials were “cracking down on one of the country’s biggest problems: small community libraries where residents share books” (Schaub). Journalists argued this was government overreach on non-issues rather than tackling larger community problems, such as income inequality, homelessness, and aging infrastructure (Solomon; Schaub). The protests and negative press coverage led to, in the case of the municipalities with front yard and detached structure ordinances, détente between stewards and councils as the latter passed amendments permitting and regulating LFLs. Whitefish Bay, Leawood, and Shreveport amended ordinances to allow for LFLs, but also to regulate them (Everson; Topil; Siegel). Ordinances about LFLs restricted their number on city blocks, placement on private property, size and height, as well as required registration with the municipality in some cases. Lincoln officials allowed the church to relocate the LFL from the right of way to church property and waived the $500 fine for the obstruction violation (Sanburn). In addition to the amendments, the protests also led to civic participation and community building including presentations to city council, a petition, and symbolic acts of defiance. Through this protest, neighbours create communities—networks of people working toward a common goal. This aspect of community building around LFLs was unintentional but it brought people together nevertheless.Building a Challenge to Traditional Libraries?LFL marketing and communication staff member Margaret Aldrich suggests in The Little Free Library Book that LFLs are successful because they are “gratifyingly doable” projects that can be accomplished by an individual (16). It is this ease of building, erecting, and maintaining LFLs that builds concern as their proliferation could challenge aspects of library service, such as public funding and patron visits. Some professional librarians are in favour of the LFLs and are stewards themselves (Charter 121; Charter 2608; Charter 9702; Charter 41074; Rumage). Others envision great opportunities for collaboration between traditional libraries and LFLs, including the library publicising LFLs and encouraging their construction as well as using LFLs to serve areas without, or far from, a public library (Svehla; Shumaker). While lauding efforts to build community, some professional librarians question the nomenclature used by the movement. They argue the phrase Little Free Libraries is inaccurate as libraries are much more than random collections of books. Instead, critics contend, the LFL structures are closer to book swaps and exchanges than actual libraries, which offer a range of services such as Internet access, digital materials, community meeting spaces, and workshops and programming on a variety of topics (American Library Association; Annoyed Librarian). One university reference and instruction librarian worries about “the general public’s perception and lumping together of little free libraries and actual ‘real’ public libraries” (Hardenbrook). By way of illustration, he imagines someone asking, “‘why do we need our tax money to go to something that can be done for FREE?’” (Hardenbrook). Librarians holding this perspective fear the movement might add to a trend of neoliberalism, limiting or ending public funding for libraries, as politicians believe that the localised, individual solutions can replace publicly funded library services. This is a trend toward what James Ferguson calls “responsibilized” citizens, those “deployed to produce governmentalized results that do not depend on direct state intervention” (172). In other countries, this shift has already begun. In the United Kingdom (UK), governments are devolving formerly public services onto community groups and volunteers. Lindsay Findlay-King, Geoff Nichols, Deborah Forbes, and Gordon Macfadyen trace the impacts of the 2012 Localism Act in the UK, which caused “sport and library asset transfers” (12) to community and volunteer groups who were then responsible for service provision and, potentially, facility maintenance as well. Rather than being in charge of a “doable” LFL, community groups and volunteers become the operators of much larger facilities. Recent efforts in the US to privatise library services as governments attempt to cut budgets and streamline services (Streitfeld) ground this fear. Image 3: “Take a Book, Share a Book,” a Little Free Library motto. Image credit: Nadine Kozak. LFLs might have real consequences for public libraries. Another potential unintended consequence of the LFLs is decreasing visits to public libraries, which could provide officials seeking to defund them with evidence that they are no longer relevant or necessary. One LFL steward and avid reader remarked that she had not used her local public library since 2014 because “I was using the Little Free Libraries” (Steward). Academics and librarians must conduct more research to determine what impact, if any, LFLs are having on visits to traditional public libraries. ConclusionLittle Free Libraries across the United States, and increasingly in other countries, have generated discussion, promoted collaboration between neighbours, and led to sharing. In other words, they have built communities. This was the intended consequence of the LFL movement. There, however, has also been unplanned community building in response to municipal threats to the structures due to right of way, safety, and planning ordinances. The more threatening concern is not the municipal ordinances used to block LFL development, but rather the trend of privatisation of publicly provided services. While people are celebrating the community built by the LFLs, caution must be exercised lest central institutions of the public and community, traditional public libraries, be lost. Academics and communities ought to consider not just impact on their local community at the street level, but also wider structural concerns so that communities can foster many “great good places”—the Little Free Libraries and traditional public libraries as well.ReferencesAldrich, Margaret. “Big Milestone for Little Free Library: 50,000 Libraries Worldwide.” Little Free Library. 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Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2015.Annoyed Librarian. “How to Protect Little Free Libraries.” Library Journal Blog 9 Jul. 2015. 26 Mar. 2017 <http://lj.libraryjournal.com/blogs/annoyedlibrarian/2015/07/09/how-to-protect-little-free-libraries/>.American Library Association. “Public Library Use.” State of America’s Libraries: A Report from the American Library Association (2015). 25 Feb. 2017 <http://www.ala.org/tools/libfactsheets/alalibraryfactsheet06>.Bauman, Caroline. “‘Little Free Libraries’ Legal in Leawood Thanks to 9-year-old Spencer Collins.” The Kansas City Star 7 Jul. 2014. 25 Feb. 2017 <http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article687562.html>.Burris, Alexandria. “First Amendment Issues Surface in Little Free Library Case.” Shreveport Times 5 Feb. 2015. 25 Feb. 2017 <http://www.shreveporttimes.com/story/news/local/2015/02/05/expert-use-zoning-law-clashes-first-amendment/22922371/>.Carpentier, Nico. 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Deciding What’s News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004.“Good Luck Spencer.” Spencer’s Little Free Library Facebook Page 25 Jun. 2014. 26 Mar. 2017 <https://www.facebook.com/Spencerslittlefreelibrary/photos/pcb.527531327376433/527531260709773/?type=3>.Hardenbrook, Joe. “A Little Rant on Little Free Libraries (AKA Probably an Unpopular Post).” Mr. Library Dude (9 Apr. 2014). 25 Feb. 2017 <https://mrlibrarydude.wordpress.com/2014/04/09/a-little-rant-on-little-free-libraries-aka-probably-an-unpopular-post/>.Harper, Deb. “Minutes.” The Leawood City Council 7 Jul. 2014. <http://www.leawood.org/pdf/cc/min/07-07-14.pdf>. Heady, Chris. “City Wants Church to Move Little Library.” Lincoln Journal Star 9 Jul. 2014. 25 Feb. 2017 <http://journalstar.com/news/local/city-wants-church-to-move-little-library/article_7753901a-42cd-5b52-9674-fc54a4d51f47.html>. Herrmann, Gretchen M. “Garage Sales Make Good Neighbors: Building Community through Neighborhood Sales.” Human Organization 62.2 (2006): 181-191.Kellogg, Carolyn. “Officials Threaten to Destroy a Little Free Library in Texas.” Los Angeles Times (1 Oct. 2015). 25 Feb. 2017 <http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-little-free-library-texas-20150930-story.html>.LaCasse, Alexander. “Why Are Some Cities Cracking Down on Little Free Libraries.” Christian Science Monitor (5 Feb. 2015). 25 Feb. 2017 <http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapter-and-verse/2015/0205/Why-are-some-cities-cracking-down-on-little-free-libraries>.Landman, Ruth H. Creating the Community in the City: Cooperatives and Community Gardens in Washington, DC Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1993. Little Free Library. Little Free Library Organization (2017). 25 Feb. 2017 <https://littlefreelibrary.org/>.Lopez, Steve. “Actor’s Curbside Libraries Is a Smash—for Most People.” LA Times 3 Feb. 2015. 25 Feb. 2017 <http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-0204-lopez-library-20150204-column.html>.Moore, Rowan. Why We Build: Power and Desire in Architecture. New York: Harper Design, 2013.Moss, Laura. “City Zoning Laws Target Little Free Libraries.” Mother Nature Network 25 Aug. 2015. 25 Feb. 2017 <http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/stories/city-zoning-laws-target-little-free-libraries>.National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Average Literacy and Numeracy Scale Scores of 25- to 65-Year Olds, by Sex, Age Group, Highest Level of Educational Attainment, and Country of Other Education System: 2012, table 604.10. 25 Feb. 2017 <https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d15/tables/dt15_604.10.asp?current=yes>.National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Average Prose, Document, and Quantitative Literacy Scores of Adults: 1992 and 2003. National Assessment of Adult Literacy. 25 Feb. 2017 <https://nces.ed.gov/naal/kf_demographics.asp>.Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community. New York: Marlowe & Company, 1999.“Our History.” Little Free Library. Little Free Library Organization (2017). 25 Feb. 2017 <https://littlefreelibrary.org/ourhistory/>.Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.Rumage, Jeff. “Little Free Libraries Now Allowed in Whitefish Bay.” Whitefish Bay Patch (8 May 2013). 25 Feb. 2017 <http://patch.com/wisconsin/whitefishbay/little-free-libraries-now-allowed-in-whitefish-bay>.Sanburn, Josh. “What Do Kansas and Nebraska Have against Small Libraries?” Time 10 Jul. 2014. 25 Feb. 2017 <http://time.com/2970649/tiny-libraries-violating-city-ordinances/>.Schaub, Michael. “Little Free Libraries on the Wrong Side of the Law.” LA Times 4 Feb. 2015. 25 Feb. 2017 <http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-little-free-libraries-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-law-20150204-story.html>.Shumaker, David. “Public Libraries, Little Free Libraries, and Embedded Librarians.” The Embedded Librarian (28 April 2014) 26 Mar. 2017 <https://embeddedlibrarian.com/2014/04/28/public-libraries-little-free-libraries-and-embedded-librarians/>.Siegel, Julie. “An Ordinance to Amend Section 16.13 of the Municipal Code with Regard to Exempt Certain Little Free Libraries from Front Yard Setback Requirements.” Village of Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin (5 Aug. 2013).Skogan, Wesley G. Police and Community in Chicago: A Tale of Three Cities. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.Solomon, Dan. “Dallas Is Regulating ‘Little Free Libraries’ for Some Reason.” Texas Monthly (14 Sept. 2016). 25 Feb. 2017 <http://www.texasmonthly.com/the-daily-post/dallas-regulating-little-free-libraries-reason/>.“Spencer’s Little Free Library.” Facebook 15 Jul. 2014. 25 Feb. 2017 <https://www.facebook.com/Spencerslittlefreelibrary/photos/pcb.527531327376433/527531260709773/?type=3>.Steward, M. Personal Interview. 7 Feb. 2017.Stingl, Jim. “Village Slaps Endnote on Little Libraries.” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 11 Nov. 2012: 1B, 7B.Streitfeld, David. “Anger as a Private Company Takes over Libraries.” The New York Times (26 Sept. 2010). 25 Feb. 2017 <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/business/27libraries.html>.Svehla, Louise. “Little Free Libraries—The Possibilities Are Endless.” Public Libraries Online (8 Mar. 2013). 25 Feb. 2017 <http://publiclibrariesonline.org/2013/03/little-free-libraries-the-possibilities-are-endless/>.Tapper, Jake. “Boy Fights Council to Save His Library.” CNN 4 Jul. 2014. 25 Feb. 2017 <http://thelead.blogs.cnn.com/2014/07/04/boy-fights-to-save-his-library/>.Topil, Greg. “Little Free Libraries in Lincoln.” City of Lincoln, Nebraska (n.d.). 25 Feb. 2017 <http://lincoln.ne.gov/City/pworks/engine/row/little-library.htm>.

Special Care Notice This article contains images of deceased people that might cause sadness or distress to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers. Introduction Like many cities, Perth was founded on wetlands that have been integral to its history and culture (Seddon 226–32). However, in order to promote a settlement agenda, early mapmakers sought to erase the city’s wetlands from cartographic depictions (Giblett, Cities). Since the colonial era, inner-Perth’s swamps and lakes have been drained, filled, significantly reduced in size, or otherwise reclaimed for urban expansion (Bekle). Not only have the swamps and lakes physically disappeared, the memories of their presence and influence on the city’s development over time are also largely forgotten. What was the site of Perth, specifically its wetlands, like before British settlement? In 2014, an interdisciplinary team at Edith Cowan University developed a digital visualisation process to re-imagine Perth prior to colonisation. This was based on early maps of the Swan River Colony and a range of archival information. The images depicted the city’s topography, hydrology, and vegetation and became the centerpiece of a physical exhibition entitled Re-imagining Perth’s Lost Wetlands and a virtual exhibition hosted by the Western Australian Museum. Alongside historic maps, paintings, photographs, and writings, the visual reconstruction of Perth aimed to foster appreciation of the pre-settlement environment—the homeland of the Whadjuck Nyoongar, or Bibbulmun, people (Carter and Nutter). The exhibition included the narrative of Fanny Balbuk, a Nyoongar woman who voiced her indignation over the “usurping of her beloved home ground” (Bates, The Passing 69) by flouting property lines and walking through private residences to reach places of cultural significance. Beginning with Balbuk’s story and the digital tracing of her walking route through colonial Perth, this article discusses the project in the context of contemporary pressures on the city’s extant wetlands. The re-imagining of Perth through historically, culturally, and geographically-grounded digital visualisation approaches can inspire the conservation of its wetlands heritage. Balbuk’s Walk through the City For many who grew up in Perth, Fanny Balbuk’s perambulations have achieved legendary status in the collective cultural imagination. In his memoir, David Whish-Wilson mentions Balbuk’s defiant walks and the lighting up of the city for astronaut John Glenn in 1962 as the two stories that had the most impact on his Perth childhood. From Gordon Stephenson House, Whish-Wilson visualises her journey in his mind’s eye, past Government House on St Georges Terrace (the main thoroughfare through the city centre), then north on Barrack Street towards the railway station, the site of Lake Kingsford where Balbuk once gathered bush tucker (4). He considers the footpaths “beneath the geometric frame of the modern city […] worn smooth over millennia that snake up through the sheoak and marri woodland and into the city’s heart” (Whish-Wilson 4). Balbuk’s story embodies the intertwined culture and nature of Perth—a city of wetlands. Born in 1840 on Heirisson Island, Balbuk (also known as Yooreel) (Figure 1) had ancestral bonds to the urban landscape. According to Daisy Bates, writing in the early 1900s, the Nyoongar term Matagarup, or “leg deep,” denotes the passage of shallow water near Heirisson Island where Balbuk would have forded the Swan River (“Oldest” 16). Yoonderup was recorded as the Nyoongar name for Heirisson Island (Bates, “Oldest” 16) and the birthplace of Balbuk’s mother (Bates, “Aboriginal”). In the suburb of Shenton Park near present-day Lake Jualbup, her father bequeathed to her a red ochre (or wilgi) pit that she guarded fervently throughout her life (Bates, “Aboriginal”).Figure 1. Group of Aboriginal Women at Perth, including Fanny Balbuk (far right) (c. 1900). Image Credit: State Library of Western Australia (Image Number: 44c). Balbuk’s grandparents were culturally linked to the site. At his favourite camp beside the freshwater spring near Kings Park on Mounts Bay Road, her grandfather witnessed the arrival of Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick Irwin, cousin of James Stirling (Bates, “Fanny”). In 1879, colonial entrepreneurs established the Swan Brewery at this significant locale (Welborn). Her grandmother’s gravesite later became Government House (Bates, “Fanny”) and she protested vociferously outside “the stone gates guarded by a sentry [that] enclosed her grandmother’s burial ground” (Bates, The Passing 70). Balbuk’s other grandmother was buried beneath Bishop’s Grove, the residence of the city’s first archibishop, now Terrace Hotel (Bates, “Aboriginal”). Historian Bob Reece observes that Balbuk was “the last full-descent woman of Kar’gatta (Karrakatta), the Bibbulmun name for the Mount Eliza [Kings Park] area of Perth” (134). According to accounts drawn from Bates, her home ground traversed the area between Heirisson Island and Perth’s north-western limits. In Kings Park, one of her relatives was buried near a large, hollow tree used by Nyoongar people like a cistern to capture water and which later became the site of the Queen Victoria Statue (Bates, “Aboriginal”). On the slopes of Mount Eliza, the highest point of Kings Park, at the western end of St Georges Terrace, she harvested plant foods, including zamia fruits (Macrozamia riedlei) (Bates, “Fanny”). Fanny Balbuk’s knowledge contributed to the native title claim lodged by Nyoongar people in 2006 as Bennell v. State of Western Australia—the first of its kind to acknowledge Aboriginal land rights in a capital city and part of the larger Single Nyoongar Claim (South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council et al.). Perth’s colonial administration perceived the city’s wetlands as impediments to progress and as insalubrious environments to be eradicated through reclamation practices. For Balbuk and other Nyoongar people, however, wetlands were “nourishing terrains” (Rose) that afforded sustenance seasonally and meaning perpetually (O’Connor, Quartermaine, and Bodney). Mary Graham, a Kombu-merri elder from Queensland, articulates the connection between land and culture, “because land is sacred and must be looked after, the relation between people and land becomes the template for society and social relations. Therefore all meaning comes from land.” Traditional, embodied reliance on Perth’s wetlands is evident in Bates’ documentation. For instance, Boojoormeup was a “big swamp full of all kinds of food, now turned into Palmerston and Lake streets” (Bates, “Aboriginal”). Considering her cultural values, Balbuk’s determination to maintain pathways through the increasingly colonial Perth environment is unsurprising (Figure 2). From Heirisson Island: a straight track had led to the place where once she had gathered jilgies [crayfish] and vegetable food with the women, in the swamp where Perth railway station now stands. Through fences and over them, Balbuk took the straight track to the end. When a house was built in the way, she broke its fence-palings with her digging stick and charged up the steps and through the rooms. (Bates, The Passing 70) One obstacle was Hooper’s Fence, which Balbuk broke repeatedly on her trips to areas between Kings Park and the railway station (Bates, “Hooper’s”). Her tenacious commitment to walking ancestral routes signifies the friction between settlement infrastructure and traditional Nyoongar livelihood during an era of rapid change. Figure 2. Determination of Fanny Balbuk’s Journey between Yoonderup (Heirisson Island) and Lake Kingsford, traversing what is now the central business district of Perth on the Swan River (2014). Image background prepared by Dimitri Fotev. Track interpolation by Jeff Murray. Project Background and Approach Inspired by Fanny Balbuk’s story, Re-imagining Perth’s Lost Wetlands began as an Australian response to the Mannahatta Project. Founded in 1999, that project used spatial analysis techniques and mapping software to visualise New York’s urbanised Manhattan Island—or Mannahatta as it was called by indigenous people—in the early 1600s (Sanderson). Based on research into the island’s original biogeography and the ecological practices of Native Americans, Mannahatta enabled the public to “peel back” the city’s strata, revealing the original composition of the New York site. The layers of visuals included rich details about the island’s landforms, water systems, and vegetation. Mannahatta compelled Rod Giblett, a cultural researcher at Edith Cowan University, to develop an analogous model for visualising Perth circa 1829. The idea attracted support from the City of Perth, Landgate, and the University. Using stories, artefacts, and maps, the team—comprising a cartographer, designer, three-dimensional modelling expert, and historical researchers—set out to generate visualisations of the landscape at the time of British colonisation. Nyoongar elder Noel Nannup approved culturally sensitive material and contributed his perspective on Aboriginal content to include in the exhibition. The initiative’s context remains pressing. In many ways, Perth has become a template for development in the metropolitan area (Weller). While not unusual for a capital, the rate of transformation is perhaps unexpected in a city less than 200 years old (Forster). There also remains a persistent view of existing wetlands as obstructions to progress that, once removed, are soon forgotten (Urban Bushland Council). Digital visualisation can contribute to appreciating environments prior to colonisation but also to re-imagining possibilities for future human interactions with land, water, and space. Despite the rapid pace of change, many Perth area residents have memories of wetlands lost during their lifetimes (for example, Giblett, Forrestdale). However, as the clearing and drainage of the inner city occurred early in settlement, recollections of urban wetlands exist exclusively in historical records. In 1935, a local correspondent using the name “Sandgroper” reminisced about swamps, connecting them to Perth’s colonial heritage: But the Swamps were very real in fact, and in name in the [eighteen-] Nineties, and the Perth of my youth cannot be visualised without them. They were, of course, drying up apace, but they were swamps for all that, and they linked us directly with the earliest days of the Colony when our great-grandparents had founded this City of Perth on a sort of hog's-back, of which Hay-street was the ridge, and from which a succession of streamlets ran down its southern slope to the river, while land locked to the north of it lay a series of lakes which have long since been filled to and built over so that the only evidence that they have ever existed lies in the original street plans of Perth prepared by Roe and Hillman in the early eighteen-thirties. A salient consequence of the loss of ecological memory is the tendency to repeat the miscues of the past, especially the blatant disregard for natural and cultural heritage, as suburbanisation engulfs the area. While the swamps of inner Perth remain only in the names of streets, existing wetlands in the metropolitan area are still being threatened, as the Roe Highway (Roe 8) Campaign demonstrates. To re-imagine Perth’s lost landscape, we used several colonial survey maps to plot the location of the original lakes and swamps. At this time, a series of interconnecting waterbodies, known as the Perth Great Lakes, spread across the north of the city (Bekle and Gentilli). This phase required the earliest cartographic sources (Figure 3) because, by 1855, city maps no longer depicted wetlands. We synthesised contextual information, such as well depths, geological and botanical maps, settlers’ accounts, Nyoongar oral histories, and colonial-era artists’ impressions, to produce renderings of Perth. This diverse collection of primary and secondary materials served as the basis for creating new images of the city. Team member Jeff Murray interpolated Balbuk’s route using historical mappings and accounts, topographical data, court records, and cartographic common sense. He determined that Balbuk would have camped on the high ground of the southern part of Lake Kingsford rather than the more inundated northern part (Figure 2). Furthermore, she would have followed a reasonably direct course north of St Georges Terrace (contrary to David Whish-Wilson’s imaginings) because she was barred from Government House for protesting. This easier route would have also avoided the springs and gullies that appear on early maps of Perth. Figure 3. Townsite of Perth in Western Australia by Colonial Draftsman A. Hillman and John Septimus Roe (1838). This map of Perth depicts the wetlands that existed overlaid by the geomentric grid of the new city. Image Credit: State Library of Western Australia (Image Number: BA1961/14). Additionally, we produced an animated display based on aerial photographs to show the historical extent of change. Prompted by the build up to World War II, the earliest aerial photography of Perth dates from the late 1930s (Dixon 148–54). As “Sandgroper” noted, by this time, most of the urban wetlands had been drained or substantially modified. The animation revealed considerable alterations to the formerly swampy Swan River shoreline. Most prominent was the transformation of the Matagarup shallows across the Swan River, originally consisting of small islands. Now traversed by a causeway, this area was transformed into a single island, Heirisson—the general site of Balbuk’s birth. The animation and accompanying materials (maps, images, and writings) enabled viewers to apprehend the changes in real time and to imagine what the city was once like. Re-imagining Perth’s Urban Heart The physical environment of inner Perth includes virtually no trace of its wetland origins. Consequently, we considered whether a representation of Perth, as it existed previously, could enhance public understanding of natural heritage and thereby increase its value. For this reason, interpretive materials were exhibited centrally at Perth Town Hall. Built partly by convicts between 1867 and 1870, the venue is close to the site of the 1829 Foundation of Perth, depicted in George Pitt Morrison’s painting. Balbuk’s grandfather “camped somewhere in the city of Perth, not far from the Town Hall” (Bates, “Fanny”). The building lies one block from the site of the railway station on the site of Lake Kingsford, the subsistence grounds of Balbuk and her forebears: The old swamp which is now the Perth railway yards had been a favourite jilgi ground; a spring near the Town Hall had been a camping place of Maiago […] and others of her fathers' folk; and all around and about city and suburbs she had gathered roots and fished for crayfish in the days gone by. (Bates, “Derelicts” 55) Beginning in 1848, the draining of Lake Kingsford reached completion during the construction of the Town Hall. While the swamps of the city were not appreciated by many residents, some organisations, such as the Perth Town Trust, vigorously opposed the reclamation of the lake, alluding to its hydrological role: That, the soil being sand, it is not to be supposed that Lake Kingsford has in itself any material effect on the wells of Perth; but that, from this same reason of the sandy soil, it would be impossible to keep the lake dry without, by so doing, withdrawing the water from at least the adjacent parts of the townsite to the same depth. (Independent Journal of Politics and News 3) At the time of our exhibition, the Lake Kingsford site was again being reworked to sink the railway line and build Yagan Square, a public space named after a colonial-era Nyoongar leader. The project required specialised construction techniques due to the high water table—the remnants of the lake. People travelling to the exhibition by train in October 2014 could have seen the lake reasserting itself in partly-filled depressions, flush with winter rain (Figure 4).Figure 4. Rise of the Repressed (2014). Water Rising in the former site of Lake Kingsford/Irwin during construction, corner of Roe and Fitzgerald Streets, Northbridge, WA. Image Credit: Nandi Chinna (2014). The exhibition was situated in the Town Hall’s enclosed undercroft designed for markets and more recently for shops. While some visited after peering curiously through the glass walls of the undercroft, others hailed from local and state government organisations. Guest comments applauded the alternative view of Perth we presented. The content invited the public to re-imagine Perth as a city of wetlands that were both environmentally and culturally important. A display panel described how the city’s infrastructure presented a hindrance for Balbuk as she attempted to negotiate the once-familiar route between Yoonderup and Lake Kingsford (Figure 2). Perth’s growth “restricted Balbuk’s wanderings; towns, trains, and farms came through her ‘line of march’; old landmarks were thus swept away, and year after year saw her less confident of the locality of one-time familiar spots” (Bates, “Fanny”). Conserving Wetlands: From Re-Claiming to Re-Valuing? Imagination, for philosopher Roger Scruton, involves “thinking of, and attending to, a present object (by thinking of it, or perceiving it, in terms of something absent)” (155). According to Scruton, the feelings aroused through imagination can prompt creative, transformative experiences. While environmental conservation tends to rely on data-driven empirical approaches, it appeals to imagination less commonly. We have found, however, that attending to the present object (the city) in terms of something absent (its wetlands) through evocative visual material can complement traditional conservation agendas focused on habitats and species. The actual extent of wetlands loss in the Swan Coastal Plain—the flat and sandy region extending from Jurien Bay south to Cape Naturaliste, including Perth—is contested. However, estimates suggest that 80 per cent of wetlands have been lost, with remaining habitats threatened by climate change, suburban development, agriculture, and industry (Department of Environment and Conservation). As with the swamps and lakes of the inner city, many regional wetlands were cleared, drained, or filled before they could be properly documented. Additionally, the seasonal fluctuations of swampy places have never been easily translatable to two-dimensional records. As Giblett notes, the creation of cartographic representations and the assignment of English names were attempts to fix the dynamic boundaries of wetlands, at least in the minds of settlers and administrators (Postmodern 72–73). Moreover, European colonists found the Western Australian landscape, including its wetlands, generally discomfiting. In a letter from 1833, metaphors failed George Fletcher Moore, the effusive colonial commentator, “I cannot compare these swamps to any marshes with which you are familiar” (220). The intermediate nature of wetlands—as neither land nor lake—is perhaps one reason for their cultural marginalisation (Giblett, Postmodern 39). The conviction that unsanitary, miasmic wetlands should be converted to more useful purposes largely prevailed (Giblett, Black 105–22). Felicity Morel-EdnieBrown’s research into land ownership records in colonial Perth demonstrated that town lots on swampland were often preferred. By layering records using geographic information systems (GIS), she revealed modifications to town plans to accommodate swampland frontages. The decline of wetlands in the region appears to have been driven initially by their exploitation for water and later for fertile soil. Northern market gardens supplied the needs of the early city. It is likely that the depletion of Nyoongar bush foods predated the flourishing of these gardens (Carter and Nutter). Engaging with the history of Perth’s swamps raises questions about the appreciation of wetlands today. In an era where numerous conservation strategies and alternatives have been developed (for example, Bobbink et al. 93–220), the exploitation of wetlands in service to population growth persists. On Perth’s north side, wetlands have long been subdued by controlling their water levels and landscaping their boundaries, as the suburban examples of Lake Monger and Hyde Park (formerly Third Swamp Reserve) reveal. Largely unmodified wetlands, such as Forrestdale Lake, exist south of Perth, but they too are in danger (Giblett, Black Swan). The Beeliar Wetlands near the suburb of Bibra Lake comprise an interconnected series of lakes and swamps that are vulnerable to a highway extension project first proposed in the 1950s. Just as the Perth Town Trust debated Lake Kingsford’s draining, local councils and the public are fiercely contesting the construction of the Roe Highway, which will bisect Beeliar Wetlands, destroying Roe Swamp (Chinna). The conservation value of wetlands still struggles to compete with traffic planning underpinned by a modernist ideology that associates cars and freeways with progress (Gregory). Outside of archives, the debate about Lake Kingsford is almost entirely forgotten and its physical presence has been erased. Despite the magnitude of loss, re-imagining the city’s swamplands, in the way that we have, calls attention to past indiscretions while invigorating future possibilities. We hope that the re-imagining of Perth’s wetlands stimulates public respect for ancestral tracks and songlines like Balbuk’s. Despite the accretions of settler history and colonial discourse, songlines endure as a fundamental cultural heritage. Nyoongar elder Noel Nannup states, “as people, if we can get out there on our songlines, even though there may be farms or roads overlaying them, fences, whatever it is that might impede us from travelling directly upon them, if we can get close proximity, we can still keep our culture alive. That is why it is so important for us to have our songlines.” Just as Fanny Balbuk plied her songlines between Yoonderup and Lake Kingsford, the traditional custodians of Beeliar and other wetlands around Perth walk the landscape as an act of resistance and solidarity, keeping the stories of place alive. Acknowledgments The authors wish to acknowledge Rod Giblett (ECU), Nandi Chinna (ECU), Susanna Iuliano (ECU), Jeff Murray (Kareff Consulting), Dimitri Fotev (City of Perth), and Brendan McAtee (Landgate) for their contributions to this project. The authors also acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands upon which this paper was researched and written. References Bates, Daisy. “Fanny Balbuk-Yooreel: The Last Swan River (Female) Native.” The Western Mail 1 Jun. 1907: 45.———. “Oldest Perth: The Days before the White Men Won.” The Western Mail 25 Dec. 1909: 16–17.———. “Derelicts: The Passing of the Bibbulmun.” The Western Mail 25 Dec. 1924: 55–56. ———. “Aboriginal Perth.” The Western Mail 4 Jul. 1929: 70.———. “Hooper’s Fence: A Query.” The Western Mail 18 Apr. 1935: 9.———. The Passing of the Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent among the Natives of Australia. London: John Murray, 1966.Bekle, Hugo. “The Wetlands Lost: Drainage of the Perth Lake Systems.” Western Geographer 5.1–2 (1981): 21–41.Bekle, Hugo, and Joseph Gentilli. “History of the Perth Lakes.” Early Days 10.5 (1993): 442–60.Bobbink, Roland, Boudewijn Beltman, Jos Verhoeven, and Dennis Whigham, eds. Wetlands: Functioning, Biodiversity Conservation, and Restoration. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2006. Carter, Bevan, and Lynda Nutter. Nyungah Land: Records of Invasion and Theft of Aboriginal Land on the Swan River 1829–1850. Guildford: Swan Valley Nyungah Community, 2005.Chinna, Nandi. “Swamp.” Griffith Review 47 (2015). 29 Sep. 2015 ‹https://griffithreview.com/articles/swamp›.Department of Environment and Conservation. Geomorphic Wetlands Swan Coastal Plain Dataset. Perth: Department of Environment and Conservation, 2008.Dixon, Robert. Photography, Early Cinema, and Colonial Modernity: Frank Hurley’s Synchronized Lecture Entertainments. London: Anthem Press, 2011. Forster, Clive. Australian Cities: Continuity and Change. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004.Giblett, Rod. Postmodern Wetlands: Culture, History, Ecology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1996. ———. Forrestdale: People and Place. Bassendean: Access Press, 2006.———. Black Swan Lake: Life of a Wetland. Bristol: Intellect, 2013.———. Cities and Wetlands: The Return of the Repressed in Nature and Culture. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Chapter 2.Graham, Mary. “Some Thoughts about the Philosophical Underpinnings of Aboriginal Worldviews.” Australian Humanities Review 45 (2008). 29 Sep. 2015 ‹http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-November-2008/graham.html›.Gregory, Jenny. “Remembering Mounts Bay: The Narrows Scheme and the Internationalization of Perth Planning.” Studies in Western Australian History 27 (2011): 145–66.Independent Journal of Politics and News. “Perth Town Trust.” The Perth Gazette and Independent Journal of Politics and News 8 Jul. 1848: 2–3.Moore, George Fletcher. Extracts from the Letters of George Fletcher Moore. Ed. Martin Doyle. London: Orr and Smith, 1834.Morel-EdnieBrown, Felicity. “Layered Landscape: The Swamps of Colonial Northbridge.” Social Science Computer Review 27 (2009): 390–419. Nannup, Noel. Songlines with Dr Noel Nannup. Dir. Faculty of Regional Professional Studies, Edith Cowan University (2015). 29 Sep. 2015 ‹https://vimeo.com/129198094›. (Quoted material transcribed from 3.08–3.39 of the video.) O’Connor, Rory, Gary Quartermaine, and Corrie Bodney. Report on an Investigation into Aboriginal Significance of Wetlands and Rivers in the Perth-Bunbury Region. Perth: Western Australian Water Resources Council, 1989.Reece, Bob. “‘Killing with Kindness’: Daisy Bates and New Norcia.” Aboriginal History 32 (2008): 128–45.Rose, Deborah Bird. Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness. Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission, 1996.Sanderson, Eric. Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2009.Sandgroper. “Gilgies: The Swamps of Perth.” The West Australian 4 May 1935: 7.Scruton, Roger. Art and Imagination. London: Methuen, 1974.Seddon, George. Sense of Place: A Response to an Environment, the Swan Coastal Plain, Western Australia. Melbourne: Bloomings Books, 2004.South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council and John Host with Chris Owen. “It’s Still in My Heart, This is My Country:” The Single Noongar Claim History. Crawley: U of Western Australia P, 2009.Urban Bushland Council. “Bushland Issues.” 2015. 29 Sep. 2015 ‹http://www.bushlandperth.org.au/bushland-issues›.Welborn, Suzanne. Swan: The History of a Brewery. Crawley: U of Western Australia P, 1987.Weller, Richard. Boomtown 2050: Scenarios for a Rapidly Growing City. Crawley: U of Western Australia P, 2009. Whish-Wilson, David. Perth. Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2013.

At a time when a trip abroad was out of the reach of most women, even if they could not make the journey, Australian women could imagine “abroad” just by reading popular women’s magazines such as Woman (later Woman’s Day and Home then Woman’s Day) and The Australian Women’s Weekly, and journals, such as The Progressive Woman and The Housewife. Increasingly in the post-war period, these magazines and journals contained advertisements for holidaying abroad, recipes for international foods and articles on overseas fashions. It was not unusual for local manufacturers, to use the lure of travel and exotic places as a way of marketing their goods. Healing Bicycles, for example, used the slogan “In Venice men go to work on Gondolas: In Australia it’s a Healing” (“Healing Cycles” 40), and Exotiq cosmetics featured landscapes of countries where Exotiq products had “captured the hearts of women who treasured their loveliness: Cincinnati, Milan, New York, Paris, Geneva and Budapest” (“Exotiq Cosmetics” 36).Unlike Homer’s Penelope, who stayed at home for twenty years waiting for Odysseus to return from the Trojan wars, women have always been on the move to the same extent as men. Their rich travel stories (Riggal, Haysom, Lancaster)—mostly written as letters and diaries—remain largely unpublished and their experiences are not part of the public record to the same extent as the travel stories of men. Ros Pesman argues that the women traveller’s voice was one of privilege and authority full of excitement and disbelief (Pesman 26). She notes that until well into the second part of the twentieth century, “the journey for Australian women to Europe was much more than a return to the sources of family identity and history” (19). It was also:a pilgrimage to the centres and sites of culture, literature and history and an encounter with “the real world.”Europe, and particularly London,was also the place of authority and reference for all those seeking accreditation and recognition, whether as real writers, real ladies or real politicians and statesmen. (19)This article is about two Australian writers; Helen Seager, a journalist employed by The Argus, a daily newspaper in Melbourne Australia, and Gwen Hughes, a graduate of Emily McPherson College of Domestic Economy in Melbourne, working in England as a lecturer, demonstrator and cookbook writer for Parkinsons’ Stove Company. Helen Seager travelled to England on an assignment for The Argus in 1950 and sent articles each day for publication in the women’s section of the newspaper. Gwen Hughes travelled extensively in the Balkans in the 1930s recording her impressions, observations, and recipes for traditional foods whilst working for Parkinsons in England. These women were neither returning to the homeland for an encounter with the real world, nor were they there as cultural tourists in the Cook’s Tour sense of the word. They were professional writers and their observations about the places they visited offer fresh and lively versions of England and Europe, its people, places, and customs.Helen SeagerAustralian Journalist Helen Seager (1901–1981) wrote a daily column, Good Morning Ma’am in the women’s pages of The Argus, from 1947 until shortly after her return from abroad in 1950. Seager wrote human interest stories, often about people of note (Golding), but with a twist; a Baroness who finds knitting exciting (Seager, “Baroness” 9) and ballet dancers backstage (Seager, “Ballet” 10). Much-loved by her mainly female readership, in May 1950 The Argus sent her to England where she would file a daily report of her travels. Whilst now we take travel for granted, Seager was sent abroad with letters of introduction from The Argus, stating that she was travelling on a special editorial assignment which included: a certificate signed by the Lord Mayor of The City of Melbourne, seeking that any courtesies be extended on her trip to England, the Continent, and America; a recommendation from the Consul General of France in Australia; and introductions from the Premier’s Department, the Premier of Victoria, and Austria’s representative in Australia. All noted the nature of her trip, her status as an esteemed reporter for a Melbourne newspaper, and requested that any courtesy possible to be made to her.This assignment was an indication that The Argus valued its women readers. Her expenses, and those of her ten-year-old daughter Harriet, who accompanied her, were covered by the newspaper. Her popularity with her readership is apparent by the enthusiastic tone of the editorial article covering her departure. Accompanied with a photograph of Seager and Harriet boarding the aeroplane, her many women readers were treated to their first ever picture of what she looked like:THOUSANDS of "Argus" readers, particularly those in the country, have wanted to know what Helen Seager looks like. Here she is, waving good-bye as she left on the first stage of a trip to England yesterday. She will be writing her bright “Good Morning, Ma'am” feature as she travels—giving her commentary on life abroad. (The Argus, “Goodbye” 1)Figure 1. Helen Seager and her daughter Harriet board their flight for EnglandThe first article “From Helen in London” read,our Helen Seager, after busy days spent exploring England with her 10-year-old daughter, Harriet, today cabled her first “Good Morning, Ma’am” column from abroad. Each day from now on she will report from London her lively impressions in an old land, which is delightfully new to her. (Seager, “From Helen” 3)Whilst some of her dispatches contain the impressions of the awestruck traveller, for the most they are exquisitely observed stories of the everyday and the ordinary, often about the seemingly most trivial of things, and give a colourful, colonial and egalitarian impression of the places that she visits. A West End hair-do is described, “as I walked into that posh looking establishment, full of Louis XV, gold ornateness to be received with bows from the waist by numerous satellites, my first reaction was to turn and bolt” (Seager, “West End” 3).When she visits Oxford’s literary establishments, she is, for this particular article, the awestruck Australian:In Oxford, you go around saying, soto voce and aloud, “Oh, ye dreaming spires of Oxford.” And Matthew Arnold comes alive again as a close personal friend.In a weekend, Ma’am, I have seen more of Oxford than lots of native Oxonians. I have stood and brooded over the spit in Christ Church College’s underground kitchens on which the oxen for Henry the Eighth were roasted.I have seen the Merton Library, oldest in Oxford, in which the chains that imprisoned the books are still to be seen, and have added by shoe scrape to the stone steps worn down by 500 years of walkers. I have walked the old churches, and I have been lost in wonder at the goodly virtues of the dead. And then, those names of Oxford! Holywell, Tom’s Quad, Friars’ Entry, and Long Wall. The gargoyles at Magdalen and the stones untouched by bombs or war’s destruction. It adds a new importance to human beings to know that once, if only, they too have walked and stood and stared. (Seager, “From Helen” 3)Her sense of wonder whilst in Oxford is, however, moderated by the practicalities of travel incorporated into the article. She continues to describe the warnings she was given, before her departure, of foreign travel that had her alarmed about loss and theft, and the care she took to avoid both. “It would have made you laugh, Ma’am, could you have seen the antics to protect personal property in the countries in transit” (Seager, “From Helen” 3).Her description of a trip to Blenheim Palace shows her sense of fun. She does not attempt to describe the palace or its contents, “Blenheim Palace is too vast and too like a great Government building to arouse much envy,” settling instead on a curiosity should there be a turn of events, “as I surged through its great halls with a good-tempered, jostling mob I couldn’t help wondering what those tired pale-faced guides would do if the mob mood changed and it started on an old-fashioned ransack.” Blenheim palace did not impress her as much as did the Sunday crowd at the palace:The only thing I really took a fancy to were the Venetian cradle, which was used during the infancy of the present Duke and a fine Savvonerie carpet in the same room. What I never wanted to see again was the rubbed-fur collar of the lady in front.Sunday’s crowd was typically English, Good tempered, and full of Cockney wit, and, if you choose to take your pleasures in the mass, it is as good a company as any to be in. (Seager, “We Look” 3)In a description of Dublin and the Dubliners, Seager describes the food-laden shops: “Butchers’ shops leave little room for customers with their great meat carcasses hanging from every hook. … English visitors—and Dublin is awash with them—make an orgy of the cakes that ooze real cream, the pink and juicy hams, and the sweets that demand no points” (Seager, “English” 6). She reports on the humanity of Dublin and Dubliners, “Dublin has a charm that is deep-laid. It springs from the people themselves. Their courtesy is overlaid with a real interest in humanity. They walk and talk, these Dubliners, like Kings” (ibid.).In Paris she melds the ordinary with the noteworthy:I had always imagined that the outside of the Louvre was like and big art gallery. Now that I know it as a series of palaces with courtyards and gardens beyond description in the daytime, and last night, with its cleverly lighted fountains all aplay, its flags and coloured lights, I will never forget it.Just now, down in the street below, somebody is packing the boot of a car to go for, presumably, on a few days’ jaunt. There is one suitcase, maybe with clothes, and on the footpath 47 bottles of the most beautiful wines in the world. (Seager, “When” 3)She writes with a mix of awe and ordinary:My first glimpse of that exciting vista of the Arc de Triomphe in the distance, and the little bistros that I’ve always wanted to see, and all the delights of a new city, […] My first day in Paris, Ma’am, has not taken one whit from the glory that was London. (ibid.) Figure 2: Helen Seager in ParisIt is my belief that Helen Seager intended to do something with her writings abroad. The articles have been cut from The Argus and pasted onto sheets of paper. She has kept copies of the original reports filed whist she was away. The collection shows her insightful egalitarian eye and a sharp humour, a mix of awesome and commonplace.On Bastille Day in 1950, Seager wrote about the celebrations in Paris. Her article is one of exuberant enthusiasm. She writes joyfully about sirens screaming overhead, and people in the street, and looking from windows. Her article, published on 19 July, starts:Paris Ma’am is a magical city. I will never cease to be grateful that I arrived on a day when every thing went wrong, and watched it blossom before my eyes into a gayness that makes our Melbourne Cup gala seem funeral in comparison.Today is July 14.All places of business are closed for five days and only the places of amusement await the world.Parisians are tireless in their celebrations.I went to sleep to the music of bands, dancing feet and singing voices, with the raucous but cheerful toots from motors splitting the night air onto atoms. (Seager, “When” 3)This article resonates uneasiness. How easily could those scenes of celebration on Bastille Day in 1950 be changed into the scenes of carnage on Bastille Day 2016, the cheerful toots of the motors transformed into cries of fear, the sirens in the sky from aeroplanes overhead into the sirens of ambulances and police vehicles, as a Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, as part of a terror attack drives a truck through crowds of people celebrating in Nice.Gwen HughesGwen Hughes graduated from Emily Macpherson College of Domestic Economy with a Diploma of Domestic Science, before she travelled to England to take up employment as senior lecturer and demonstrator of Parkinson’s England, a company that manufactured electric and gas stoves. Hughes wrote in her unpublished manuscript, Balkan Fever, that it was her idea of making ordinary cooking demonstration lessons dramatic and homelike that landed her the job in England (Hughes, Balkan 25-26).Her cookbook, Perfect Cooking, was produced to encourage housewives to enjoy cooking with their Parkinson’s modern cookers with the new Adjusto temperature control. The message she had to convey for Parkinsons was: “Cooking is a matter of putting the right ingredients together and cooking them at the right temperature to achieve a given result” (Hughes, Perfect 3). In reality, Hughes used this cookbook as a vehicle to share her interest in and love of Continental food, especially food from the Balkans where she travelled extensively in the 1930s.Recipes of Continental foods published in Perfect Cooking sit seamlessly alongside traditional British foods. The section on soup, for example, contains recipes for Borscht, a very good soup cooked by the peasants of Russia; Minestrone, an everyday Italian soup; Escudella, from Spain; and Cream of Spinach Soup from France (Perfect 22-23). Hughes devoted a whole chapter to recipes and descriptions of Continental foods labelled “Fascinating Foods From Far Countries,” showing her love and fascination with food and travel. She started this chapter with the observation:There is nearly as much excitement and romance, and, perhaps fear, about sampling a “foreign dish” for the “home stayer” as there is in actually being there for the more adventurous “home leaver”. Let us have a little have a little cruise safe within the comfort of our British homes. Let us try and taste the good things each country is famed for, all the while picturing the romantic setting of these dishes. (Hughes, Perfect 255)Through her recipes and descriptive passages, Hughes took housewives in England and Australia into the strange and wonderful kitchens of exotic women: Madame Darinka Jocanovic in Belgrade, Miss Anicka Zmelova in Prague, Madame Mrskosova at Benesova. These women taught her to make wonderful-sounding foods such as Apfel Strudel, Knedlikcy, Vanilla Kipfel and Christmas Stars. “Who would not enjoy the famous ‘Goose with Dumplings,’” she declares, “in the company of these gay, brave, thoughtful people with their romantic history, their gorgeously appareled peasants set in their richly picturesque scenery” (Perfect 255).It is Hughes’ unpublished manuscript Balkan Fever, written in Melbourne in 1943, to which I now turn. It is part of the Latrobe Heritage collection at the State Library of Victoria. Her manuscript was based on her extensive travels in the Balkans in the 1930s whilst she lived and worked in England, and it was, I suspect, her intention to seek publication.In her twenties, Hughes describes how she set off to the Balkans after meeting a fellow member of the Associated Country Women of the World (ACWW) at the Royal Yugoslav Legation. He was an expert on village life in the Balkans and advised her, that as a writer she would get more information from the local villagers than she would as a tourist. Hughes, who, before television gave cooking demonstrations on the radio, wrote, “I had been writing down recipes and putting them in books for years and of course the things one talks about over the air have to be written down first—that seemed fair enough” (Hughes, Balkan 25-26). There is nothing of the awestruck traveller in Hughes’ richly detailed observations of the people and the places that she visited. “Travelling in the Balkans is a very different affair from travelling in tourist-conscious countries where you just leave it to Cooks. You must either have unlimited time at your disposal, know the language or else have introductions that will enable the right arrangements to be made for you” (Balkan 2), she wrote. She was the experiential tourist, deeply immersed in her surroundings and recording food culture and society as it was.Hughes acknowledged that she was always drawn away from the cities to seek the real life of the people. “It’s to the country district you must go to find the real flavour of a country and the heart of its people—especially in the Balkans where such a large percentage of the population is agricultural” (Balkan 59). Her descriptions in Balkan Fever are a blend of geography, history, culture, national songs, folklore, national costumes, food, embroidery, and vivid observation of the everyday city life. She made little mention of stately homes or buildings. Her attitude to travel can be summed up in her own words:there are so many things to see and learn in the countries of the old world that, walking with eyes and mind wide open can be an immensely delightful pastime, even with no companion and nowhere to go. An hour or two spent in some unpretentious coffee house can be worth all the dinners at Quaglino’s or at The Ritz, if your companion is a good talker, a specialist in your subject, or knows something of the politics and the inner life of the country you are in. (Balkan 28)Rather than touring the grand cities, she was seduced by the market places with their abundance of food, colour, and action. Describing Sarajevo she wrote:On market day the main square is a blaze of colour and movement, the buyers no less colourful than the peasants who have come in from the farms around with their produce—cream cheese, eggs, chickens, fruit and vegetables. Handmade carpets hung up for sale against walls or from trees add their barbaric colour to the splendor of the scene. (Balkan 75)Markets she visited come to life through her vivid descriptions:Oh those markets, with the gorgeous colours, and heaped untidiness of the fruits and vegetables—paprika, those red and green peppers! Every kind of melon, grape and tomato contributing to the riot of colour. Then there were the fascinating peasant embroideries, laces and rich parts of old costumes brought in from the villages for sale. The lovely gay old embroideries were just laid out on a narrow carpet spread along the pavement or hung from a tree if one happened to be there. (Balkan 11)Perhaps it was her radio cooking shows that gave her the ability to make her descriptions sensorial and pictorial:We tasted luxurious foods, fish, chickens, fruits, wines, and liqueurs. All products of the country. Perfect ambrosial nectar of the gods. I was entirely seduced by the rose petal syrup, fragrant and aromatic, a red drink made from the petals of the darkest red roses. (Balkan 151)Ordinary places and everyday events are beautifully realised:We visited the cheese factory amongst other things. … It was curious to see in that far away spot such a quantity of neatly arranged cheeses in the curing chamber, being prepared for export, and in another room the primitive looking round balls of creamed cheese suspended from rafters. Later we saw trains of pack horses going over the mountains, and these were probably the bearers of these cheeses to Bitolj or Skoplje, whence they would be consigned further for export. (Balkan 182)ConclusionReading Seager and Hughes, one cannot help but be swept along on their travels and take part in their journeys. What is clear, is that they were inspired by their work, which is reflected in the way they wrote about the places they visited. Both sought out people and places that were, as Hughes so vividly puts it, not part of the Cook’s Tour. They travelled with their eyes wide open for experiences that were both new and normal, making their writing relevant even today. Written in Paris on Bastille Day 1950, Seager’s Bastille Day article is poignant when compared to Bastille Day in France in 2016. Hughes’s descriptions of Sarajevo are a far cry from the scenes of destruction in that city between 1992 and 1995. The travel writing of these two women offers us vivid impressions and images of the often unreported events, places, daily lives, and industry of the ordinary and the then every day, and remind us that the more things change, the more they stay the same.Pesman writes, “women have always been on the move and Australian women have been as numerous as passengers on the outbound ships as have men” (20), but the records of their travels seldom appear on the public record. Whilst their work-related writings are part of the public record (see Haysom; Lancaster; Riggal), this body of women’s travel writing has not received the attention it deserves. Hughes’ cookbooks, with their traditional Eastern European recipes and evocative descriptions of people and kitchens, are only there for the researcher who knows that cookbooks are a trove of valuable social and cultural material. Digital copies of Seager’s writing can be accessed on Trove (a digital repository), but there is little else about her or her body of writing on the public record.ReferencesThe Argus. “Goodbye Ma’am.” 26 May 1950: 1. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/22831285?searchTerm=Goodbye%20Ma%E2%80%99am%E2%80%99&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=195>.“Exotiq Cosmetics.” Advertisement. Woman 20 Aug. 1945: 36.Golding, Peter. “Just a Chattel of the Sale: A Mostly Light-Hearted Retrospective of a Diverse Life.” In Jim Usher, ed., The Argus: Life & Death of Newspaper. North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing 2007.Haysom, Ida. Diaries and Photographs of Ida Haysom. <http://search.slv.vic.gov.au/MAIN:Everything:SLV_VOYAGER1637361>.“Healing Cycles.” Advertisement. Woman 27 Aug. 1945: 40. Hughes, Gwen. Balkan Fever. Unpublished Manuscript. State Library of Victoria, MS 12985 Box 3846/4. 1943.———. Perfect Cooking London: Parkinsons, c1940.Lancaster, Rosemary. Je Suis Australienne: Remarkable Women in France 1880-1945. Crawley WA: UWA Press, 2008.Pesman, Ros. “Overseas Travel of Australian Women: Sources in the Australian Manuscripts Collection of the State Library of Victoria.” The Latrobe Journal 58 (Spring 1996): 19-26.Riggal, Louie. (Louise Blanche.) Diary of Italian Tour 1905 February 21 - May 1. <http://search.slv.vic.gov.au/MAIN:Everything:SLV_VOYAGER1635602>.Seager, Helen. “Ballet Dancers Backstage.” The Argus 10 Aug. 1944: 10. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/11356057?searchTerm=Ballet%20Dancers%20Backstage&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=194>.———. “The Baroness Who Finds Knitting Exciting.” The Argus 1 Aug. 1944: 9. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/11354557?searchTerm=Helen%20seager%20Baroness&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=194>.———. “English Visitors Have a Food Spree in Eire.” The Argus 29 Sep. 1950: 6. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/22912011?searchTerm=English%20visitors%20have%20a%20spree%20in%20Eire&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=195>.———. “From Helen in London.” The Argus 20 June 1950: 3. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/22836738?searchTerm=From%20Helen%20in%20London&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=195>.———. “Helen Seager Storms Paris—Paris Falls.” The Argus 15 July 1950: 7.<http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/22906913?searchTerm=Helen%20Seager%20Storms%20Paris%E2%80%99&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=195>.———. “We Look over Blenheim Palace.” The Argus 28 Sep. 1950: 3. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/22902040?searchTerm=Helen%20Seager%20Its%20as%20a%20good%20a%20place%20as%20you%20would%20want%20to%20be&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=195>.———. “West End Hair-Do Was Fun.” The Argus 3 July 1950: 3. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/22913940?searchTerm=West%20End%20hair-do%20was%20fun%E2%80%99&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=195>.———. “When You Are in Paris on July 14.” The Argus 19 July 1950: 3. <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/22906244?searchTerm=When%20you%20are%20in%20Paris%20on%20July%2014&searchLimits=l-title=13|||l-decade=195>.

Introduction Children are not only born digital, they are fashioned toward a lifestyle that needs them to be digital all the time (Palfrey and Gasser). They click, tap, save, circulate, download, and upload the texts of their lives, their friends’ lives, and the anonymous lives of the people that surround them. They are socialised as Internet consumers ready to participate in digital services targeted to them as they age such as Snapchat, Instagram, and YouTube. But they are also fashioned as producers, whereby their lives are sold as content on these same markets. As commodities, the minutiae of their lives become the fodder for online circulation. Paradoxically, we also celebrate these digital behaviours as a means to express identity. Personal profile-building for adults is considered agency-building (Beer and Burrows), and as a consequence, we praise children for mimicking these acts of adult lifestyle. This article reflects on the Kids, Creative Storyworlds, and Wearables project, which involved an ethnographic study with five young children (ages 4-7), who were asked to share their autobiographical stories, creative self-narrations, and predictions about their future mediated lives (Atkins et al.). For this case study, we focus on commercialised forms of children’s automedia, and we compare discussions we had with 6-year old Cayden, a child we met in the study who expresses the desire to make himself famous online, with videos of Jacob, a child vlogger on YouTube’s Kinder Playtime, who clearly influences children like Cayden. We argue that child social influencers need consideration both as autobiographical agents and as child subjects requiring a sheltered approach to their online lives.Automedia Automedia is an emergent genre of autobiography (Smith and Watson Reading 190; “Virtually Me” 78). Broadcasting one’s life online takes many forms (Kennedy “Vulnerability”). Ümit Kennedy argues “Vlogging on YouTube is a contemporary form of autobiography in which individuals engage in a process of documenting their life on a daily or weekly basis and, in doing so, construct[ing] their identity online” (“Exploring”). Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson write that “visual and digital modes are projecting and circulating not just new subjects but new notions of subjectivity through the effects of automediality” with the result that “the archive of the self in time, in space and in relation expands and is fundamentally reorganized” (Reading 190). Emma Maguire addresses what online texts “tell us about cultural understandings of selfhood and what it means to communicate ‘real’ life through media” naming one tool, “automedia”. Further, Julie Rak calls on scholars “to rethink ‘life’ and ‘writing’ as automedia” to further “characterize the enactment of a personal life story in a new media environment.” We define automedia as a genre that involves the practices of creating, performing, sharing, circulating, and (at times) preserving one’s digital life narrative meant for multiple publics. Automedia revises identity formation, embodiment, or corporealities in acts of self-creation (Brophy and Hladki 4). Automedia also emphasizes circulation. As shared digital life texts now circulate through the behaviours of other human subjects, and automatically via algorithms in data assemblages, we contend that automediality currently involves a measure of relinquishing control over perpetually evolving mediatised environments. One cannot control how a shared life narrative will meet a public in the future, which is a revised way of thinking about autobiography. For the sake of this paper, we argue that children’s automedia ought to be considered a creative, autobiographical act, in order to afford child authors who create them the consideration they deserve as agents, now and in the future. Automedial practices often begin when children receive access to a device. The need for a distraction activity is often the reason parents hand a young child a smartphone, iPad, or even a wearable camera (Nansen). Mirroring the lives of parents, children aspire to share representations of their own personal lives in pursuit of social capital. They are often encouraged to use technologies and apps as adults do–to track aspects of self, broadcast life stories and eventually “live share” them—effectively creating, performing, sharing, and at times, seeking to preserve a public life narrative. With this practice, society inculcates children into spheres of device ubiquity, “socializing them to a future digital lifestyle that will involve always carrying a computer in some form” (Atkins et al. 49). Consequently, their representations become inculcated in larger media assemblages. Writing about toddlers, Nansen describes how the “archiving, circulation and reception of these images speaks to larger assemblages of media in which software protocols and algorithms are increasingly embedded in and help to configure everyday life (e.g. Chun; Gillespie), including young children’s media lives (Ito)” (Nansen). Children, like adult citizens, are increasingly faced with choices “not structured by their own preferences but by the economic imperatives of the private corporations that have recently come to dominate the internet” (Andrejevic). Recent studies have shown that for children and youth in the digital age, Internet fame, often characterized by brand endorsements, is a major aspiration (Uhls and Greenfield, 2). However, despite the ambition to participate as celebrity digital selves, children are also mired in the calls to shield them from exposure to screens through institutions that label these activities detrimental. In many countries, digital “protections” are outlined by privacy commissioners and federal or provincial/state statutes, (e.g. Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada). Consequently, children are often caught in a paradox that defines them either as literate digital agents able to compose or participate with their online selves, or as subjectified wards caught up in commercial practices that exploit their lives for commercial gain.Kids, Creative Storyworlds and Wearables ProjectBoth academic and popular cultural critics continually discuss the future but rarely directly engage the people who will be empowered (or subjugated) by it as young adults in twenty years. To address children’s lack of agency in these discussions, we launched the Kids, Creative Storyworlds and Wearables project to bring children into a dialogue about their own digital futures. Much has been written on childhood agency and participation in culture and mediated culture from the discipline of sociology (James and James; Jenks; Jenkins). In previous work, we addressed the perspective of child autobiographical feature filmmakers to explore issues of creative agency and consent when adult gatekeepers facilitate children in film production (Pedersen and Aspevig “My Eyes”; Pedersen and Aspevig “Swept”). Drawing on that previous work, this project concentrates on children’s automediated lives and the many unique concerns that materialize with digital identity-building. Children are categorised as a vulnerable demographic group necessitating special policy and legislation, but the lives they project as children will eventually become subsumed in their own adult lives, which will almost certainly be treated and mediated in a much different manner in the future. We focused on this landscape, and sought to query the children on their futures, also considering the issues that arise when adult gatekeepers get involved with child social media influencers. In the Storyworlds ethnographic study, children were given a wearable toy, a Vtech smartwatch called Kidizoom, to use over a month’s timeframe to serve as a focal point for ethnographic conversations. The Kidizoom watch enables children to take photos and videos, which are uploaded to a web interface. Before we gave them the tech, we asked them questions about their lives, including What are machines going to be like in the future? Can you imagine yourself wearing a certain kind of computer? Can you tell/draw a story about that? If you could wear a computer that gave you a super power, what would it be? Can you use your imagination to think of a person in a story who would use technology? In answering, many of them drew autobiographical drawings of technical inventions, and cast themselves in the images. We were particularly struck by the comments made by one participant, Cayden (pseudonym), a 6-year-old boy, and the stories he told us about himself and his aspirations. He expressed the desire to host a YouTube channel about his life, his activities, and the wearable technologies his family already owned (e.g. a GroPro camera) and the one we gave him, the Kidizoom smartwatch. He talked about how he would be proud to publically broadcast his own videos on YouTube, and about the role he had been allowed to play in the making of videos about his life (that were not broadcast). To contextualize Cayden’s commentary and his automedial aspirations, we extended our study to explore child social media influencers who broadcast components of their personal lives for the deliberate purpose of popularity and the financial gain of their parents.We selected the videos of Jacob, a child vlogger because we judged them to be representative of the kinds that Cayden watched. Jacob reviews toys through “unboxing videos,” a genre in which a child tells an online audience her or his personal experiences using new toys in regular, short videos on a social media site. Jacob appears on a YouTube channel called Kinder Playtime, which appears to be a parent-run channel that states that, “We enjoy doing these things while playing with our kids: Jacob, Emily, and Chloe” (see Figure 1). In one particular video, Jacob reviews the Kidizoom watch, serving as a child influencer for the product. By understanding Jacob’s performance as agent-driven automedia, as well as being a commercialised, mediatised form of advertising, we get a clearer picture of how the children in the study are coming to terms with their own digital selfhood and the realisation that circulated, life-exposing videos are the expectation in this context.Children are implicated in a range of ways through “family” influencer and toy unboxing videos, which are emergent entertainment industries (Abidin 1; Nansen and Nicoll; Craig and Cunningham 77). In particular, unboxing videos do impact child viewers, especially when children host them. Jackie Marsh emphasizes the digital literacy practices at play here that co-construct viewers as “cyberflâneur[s]” and she states that “this mode of cultural transmission is a growing feature of online practices for this age group” (369). Her stress, however, is on how the child viewer enjoys “the vicarious pleasure he or she may get from viewing the playing of another child with the toy” (376). Marsh writes that her study subject, a child called “Gareth”, “was not interested in being made visible to EvanHD [a child celebrity social media influencer] or other online peers, but was content to consume” the unboxing videos. The concept of the cyberflâneur, then, is fitting as a mediatising co-constituting process of identity-building within discourses of consumerism. However, in our study, the children, and especially Cayden, also expressed the desire to create, host, and circulate their own videos that broadcast their lives, also demonstrating awareness that videos are valorised in their social circles. Child viewers watch famous children perform consumer-identities to create an aura of influence, but viewers simultaneously aspire to become influencers using automedial performances, in essence, becoming products, themselves. Jacob, Automedial Subjects and Social Media InfluencersJacob is a vlogger on YouTube whose videos can garner millions of views, suggesting that he is also an influencer. In one video, he appears to be around the age of six as he proudly sits with folded hands, bright eyes, and a beaming, but partly toothless smile (see Figure 2). He says, “Welcome to Kinder Playtime! Today we have the Kidi Zoom Smartwatch DX. It’s from VTech” (Kinder Playtime). We see the Kidi Zoom unboxed and then depicted in stylized animations amid snippets of Jacob’s smiling face. The voice and hands of a faceless parent guide Jacob as he uses his new wearable toy. We listen to both parent and child describe numerous features for recording and enhancing the wearer’s daily habits (e.g. calculator, calendar, fitness games), and his dad tells him it has a pedometer “which tracks your steps” (Kinder Playtime). But the watch is also used by Jacob to mediate himself and his world. We see that Jacob takes pictures of himself on the tiny watch screen as he acts silly for the camera. He also uses the watch to take personal videos of his mother and sister in his home. The video ends with his father mentioning bedtime, which prompts a “thank you” to VTech for giving him the watch, and a cheerful “Bye!” from Jacob (Kinder Playtime). Figure 1: Screenshot of Kinder Playtime YouTube channel, About page Figure 2: Screenshot of “Jacob,” a child vlogger at Kinder Playtime We chose Jacob for three reasons. First, he is the same age as the children in the Storyworlds study. Second, he reviews the smart watch artifact that we gave to the study children, so there was a common use of automedia technology. Third, Jacob’s parents were involved with his broadcasts, and we wanted to work within the boundaries of parent-sanctioned practices. However, we also felt that his playful approach was a good example of how social media influence overlaps with automediality. Jacob is a labourer trading his public self-representations in exchange for free products and revenue earned through the monetisation of his content on YouTube. It appears that much of what Jacob says is scripted, particularly the promotional statements, like, “Today we have the Kidizoom Smartwatch DX. It’s from VTech. It’s the smartest watch for kids” (Kinder Playtime). Importantly, as an automedial subject Jacob reveals aspects of his self and his identity, in the manner of many child vloggers on public social media sites. His product reviews are contextualised within a commoditised space that provides him a means for the public performance of his self, which, via YouTube, has the potential to reach an enormous audience. YouTube claims to have “over a billion users—almost one-third of all people on the Internet—and every day people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions of views” (YouTube). Significantly, he is not only filmed by others, Jacob is also a creative practitioner, as Cayden aspired to become. Jacob uses high-tech toys, in this case, a new wearable technology for self-compositions (the smart watch), to record himself, friends, family or simply the goings-on around him. Strapped to his wrist, the watch toy lets him play at being watched, at being quantified and at recording the life stories of others, or constructing automediated creations for himself, which he may upload to numerous social media sites. This is the start of his online automediated life, which will be increasingly under his ownership as he ages. To greater or lesser degrees, he will later be able to curate, add to, and remediate his body of automedia, including his digital past. Kennedy points out that “people are using YouTube as a transformative tool, and mirror, to document, construct, and present their identity online” (“Exploring”). Her focus is on adult vloggers who consent to their activities. Jacob’s automedia is constructed collaboratively with his parents, and it is unclear how much awareness he has of himself as an automedia creator. However, if we don’t afford Jacob the same consideration as we afford adult autobiographers, that the depiction of his life is his own, we will reduce his identity performance to pure artifice or advertisement. The questions Jacob’s videos raise around agency, consent, and creativity are important here. Sidonie Smith asks “Can there be a free, agentic space; and if so, where in the world can it be found?” (Manifesto 188). How much agency does Jacob have? Is there a liberating aspect in the act of putting personal technology into the hands of a child who can record his life, himself? And finally, how would an adult Jacob feel about his childhood self advertising these products online? Is this really automediality if Jacob does not fully understand what it means to publicly tell a mediated life story?These queries lead to concerns over child social media influence with regard to legal protection, marketing ethics, and user consent. The rise of “fan marketing” presents a nexus of stealth marketing to children by other children. Stealth marketing involves participants, in this case, fans, who do not know they are involved in an advertising scheme. For instance, the popular Minecon Minecraft conference event sessions have pushed their audience to develop the skills to become advocates and advertisers of their products, for example by showing audiences how to build a YouTube channel and sharing tips for growing a community. Targeting children in marketing ploys seems insidious. Marketing analyst Sandy Fleisher describes the value of outsourcing marketing to fan labourers:while Grand Theft Auto spent $120 million on marketing its latest release, Minecraft fans are being taught how to create and market promotional content themselves. One [example] is Minecraft YouTuber, SkydoesMinecraft. His nearly 7 million strong YouTube army, almost as big as Justin Bieber’s, means his daily videos enjoy a lot of views; 1,419,734,267 to be precise. While concerns about meaningful consent that practices like this raise have led some government bodies, and consumer and child protection groups to advocate restrictions for children, other critics have questioned the limits placed on children’s free expression by such restrictions. Tech commentator Larry Magid has written that, “In the interest of protecting children, we sometimes deny them the right to access material and express themselves.” Meghan M. Sweeney notes that “the surge in collaborative web models and the emphasis on interactivity—frequently termed Web 2.0—has meant that children are not merely targets of global media organizations” but have “multiple opportunities to be active, critical, and resistant producers”...and ”may be active agents in the production and dissemination of information” (68). Nevertheless, writes Sweeney, “corporate entities can have restrictive effects on consumers” (68), by for example, limiting imaginative play to the choices offered on a Disney website, or limiting imaginative topics to commercial products (toys, video games etc), as in YouTube review videos. Automedia is an important site from which to consider young children’s online practices in public spheres. Jacob’s performance is indeed meant to influence the choice to buy a toy, but it is also meant to influence others in knowing Jacob as an identity. He means to share and circulate his self. Julie Rak recalls Paul John Eakin’s claims about life-writing that the “process does not even occur at the level of writing, but at the level of living, so that identity formation is the result of narrative-building.” We view Jacob’s performance along these lines. Kinder Playtime offers him a constrained, parent-sanctioned (albeit commercialised) space for role-playing, a practice bound up with identity-formation in the life of most children. To think through the legality of recognising Jacob’s automedial content as his life, Rak is also useful: “In Eakin’s work in particular, we can see evidence of John Locke’s contention that identity is the expression of consciousness which is continuous over time, but that identity is also a product, one’s own property which is a legal entity”. We have argued that children are often caught in the paradox that defines them either as literate digital creators composing and circulating their online selves or as subjectified personas caught up in commercial advertising practices that use their lives for commercial gain. However, through close observation of individual children, one who we met and questioned in our study, Cayden, the other who we met through his mediated, commercialized, and circulated online persona, Jacob, we argue that child social influencers need consideration as autobiographical agents expressing themselves through automediality. As children create, edit, and grow digital traces of their lives and selves, how these texts are framed becomes increasingly important, in part because their future adult selves have such a stake in the matter: they are being formed through automedia. Moreover, these children’s coming of age may bring legal questions about the ownership of their automedial products such as YouTube videos, an enduring legacy they are leaving behind for their adult selves. Crucially, if we reduce identity performances such as unboxing, toy review videos, and other forms of children’s fan marketing to pure advertisement, we cannot afford Jacob and other child influencers the agency that their self representation is legally and artistically their own.ReferencesAbidin, Crystal. “#familygoals: Family Influencers, Calibrated Amateurism, and Justifying Young Digital Labor.” Social Media + Society 3.2 (2017): 1-15.Andrejevic, Mark. “Privacy, Exploitation, and the Digital Enclosure.” Amsterdam Law Forum 1.4 (2009). <http://amsterdamlawforum.org/article/view/94/168>.Atkins, Bridgette, Isabel Pedersen, Shirley Van Nuland, and Samantha Reid. “A Glimpse into the Kids, Creative Storyworlds and Wearables Project: A Work-in-Progress.” ICET 60th World Assembly: Teachers for a Better World: Creating Conditions for Quality Education – Pedagogy, Policy and Professionalism. 2017. 49-60.Beer, David, and Roger Burrows. “Popular Culture, Digital Archives and the New Social Life of Data.” Theory, Culture & Society 30.4 (2013): 47–71.Brophy, Sarah, and Janice Hladki. 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IntroductionThe walking tour is an enduring feature of cities. Fuelled by a desire to learn more about the hidden and unknown spaces of the city, the walking tour has moved beyond its historical role as tourist attraction to play a key role in the transformation of urban space through gentrification. Conversely, the walking tour has a counter-history as part of a critical urban praxis. This article reflects on historical examples, as well as our own experience of conducting Field Trip, a critical geographical walking tour through an industrial precinct in Marrickville, a suburb of Sydney that is set to undergo rapid change as a result of high-rise residential apartment construction (Gibson et al.). This precinct, known as Carrington Road, is located on the unceded land of the Cadigal and Wangal people of the Eora nation who call the area Bulanaming.Drawing on a long history of philosophical walking, many contemporary writers (Solnit; Gros; Bendiner-Viani) have described walking as a practice that can open different ways of thinking, observing and being in the world. Some have focused on the value of walking to the study of place (Hall; Philips; Heddon), and have underscored its relationship to established research methods, such as sensory ethnography (Springgay and Truman). The work of Michel de Certeau pays particular attention to the relationship between walking and the city. In particular, the concepts of tactics and strategy have been applied in a variety of ways across cultural studies, cultural geography, and urban studies (Morris). In line with de Certeau’s thinking, we view walking as an example of a tactic – a routine and often unconscious practice that can become a form of creative resistance.In this sense, walking can be a way to engage in and design the city by opposing its structures, or strategies. For example, walking in a city such as Sydney that is designed for cars requires choosing alternative paths, redirecting flows of people and traffic, and creating custom shortcuts. Choosing pedestrianism in Sydney can certainly feel like a form of resistance, and we make the argument that Field Trip – and walking tours more generally – can be a way of doing this collectively, firstly by moving in opposite directions, and secondly, at incongruent speeds to those for whom the scale and style of strategic urban development is inevitable. How such tactical walking relates to the design of cities, however, is less clear. Walking is a generally described in the literature as an individual act, while the design of cities is, at its best participatory, and always involving multiple stakeholders. This reveals a tension between the practice of walking as a détournement or appropriation of urban space, and its relationship to existing built form. Field Trip, as an example of collective walking, is one such appropriation of urban space – one designed to lead to more democratic decision making around the planning and design of cities. Given the anti-democratic, “post-political” nature of contemporary “consultation” processes, this is a seemingly huge task (Legacy et al.; Ruming). We make the argument that Field Trip – and walking tours more generally – can be a form of collective resistance to top-down urban planning.By using an open-source wiki in combination with the Internet Archive, Field Trip also seeks to collectively document and make public the local knowledge generated by walking at the frontier of gentrification. We discuss these digital choices as oppositional practice, and consider the idea of tactical media (Lovink and Garcia; Raley) in order to connect knowledge sharing with the practice of walking.This article is structured in four parts. Firstly, we provide a historical introduction to the relationship between walking tours and gentrification of global cities. Secondly, we examine the significance of walking tours in Sydney and then specifically within Marrickville. Thirdly, we discuss the Field Trip project as a citizen-led walking tour and, finally, elaborate on its role as tactical media project and offer some conclusions.The Walking Tour and Gentrification From the outset, people have been walking the city in their own ways and creating their own systems of navigation, often in spite of the plans of officialdom. The rapid expansion of cities following the Industrial Revolution led to the emergence of “imaginative geographies”, where mediated representations of different urban conditions became a stand-in for lived experience (Steinbrink 219). The urban walking tour as mediated political tactic was utilised as far back as Victorian England, for reasons including the celebration of public works like the sewer system (Garrett), and the “othering” of the working class through upper- and middle-class “slum tourism” in London’s East End (Steinbrink 220). The influence of the Situationist theory of dérive has been immense upon those interested in walking the city, and we borrow from the dérive a desire to report on the under-reported spaces of the city, and to articulate alternative voices within the city in this project. It should be noted, however, that as Field Trip was developed for general public participation, and was organised with institutional support, some aspects of the dérive – particularly its disregard for formal structure – were unable to be incorporated into the project. Our responsibility to the participants of Field Trip, moreover, required the imposition of structure and timetable upon the walk. However, our individual and collective preparation for Field Trip, as well as our collective understanding of the area to be examined, has been heavily informed by psychogeographic methods that focus on quotidian and informal urban practices (Crosby and Searle; Iveson et al).In post-war American cities, walking tours were utilised in the service of gentrification. Many tours were organised by real estate agents with the express purpose of selling devalorised inner-city real estate to urban “pioneers” for renovation, including in Boston’s South End (Tissot) and Brooklyn’s Park Slope, among others (Lees et al 25). These tours focused on a symbolic revalorisation of “slum neighbourhoods” through a focus on “high culture”, with architectural and design heritage featuring prominently. At the same time, urban socio-economic and cultural issues – poverty, homelessness, income disparity, displacement – were downplayed or overlooked. These tours contributed to a climate in which property speculation and displacement through gentrification practices were normalised. To this day, “ghetto tours” operate in minority neighbourhoods in Brooklyn, serving as a beachhead for gentrification.Elsewhere in the world, walking tours are often voyeuristic, featuring “locals” guiding well-meaning tourists through the neighbourhoods of some of the world’s most impoverished communities. Examples include the long runningKlong Toei Private Tour, through “Bangkok’s oldest and largest slum”, or the now-ceased Jakarta Hidden Tours, which took tourists to the riverbanks of Jakarta to see the city’s poorest before they were displaced by gentrification.More recently, all over the world activists have engaged in walking tours to provide their own perspective on urban change, attempting to direct the gentrifier’s gaze inward. Whilst the most confrontational of these might be the Yuppie Gazing Tour of Vancouver’s historically marginalised Downtown Eastside, other tours have highlighted the deleterious effects of gentrification in Williamsburg, San Francisco, Oakland, and Surabaya, among others. In smaller towns, walking tours have been utilised to highlight the erasure of marginalised scenes and subcultures, including underground creative spaces, migrant enclaves, alternative and queer spaces. Walking Sydney, Walking Marrickville In many cities, there are now both walking tours that intend to scaffold urban renewal, and those that resist gentrification with alternative narratives. There are also some that unwittingly do both simultaneously. Marrickville is a historically working-class and migrant suburb with sizeable populations of Greek and Vietnamese migrants (Graham and Connell), as well as a strong history of manufacturing (Castles et al.), which has been undergoing gentrification for some time, with the arts playing an often contradictory role in its transformation (Gibson and Homan). More recently, as the suburb experiences rampant, financialised property development driven by global flows of capital, property developers have organised their own self-guided walking tours, deployed to facilitate the familiarisation of potential purchasers of dwellings with local amenities and ‘character’ in precincts where redevelopment is set to occur. Mirvac, Marrickville’s most active developer, has designed its own self-guided walking tour Hit the Marrickville Pavement to “explore what’s on offer” and “chat to locals”: just 7km from the CBD, Marrickville is fast becoming one of Sydney’s most iconic suburbs – a melting pot of cuisines, creative arts and characters founded on a rich multicultural heritage.The perfect introduction, this self-guided walking tour explores Marrickville’s historical architecture at a leisurely pace, finishing up at the pub.So, strap on your walking shoes; you're in for a treat.Other walking tours in the area seek to highlight political, ecological, and architectural dimension of Marrickville. For example, Marrickville Maps: Tropical Imaginaries of Abundance provides a series of plant-led walks in the suburb; The Warren Walk is a tour organised by local Australian Labor Party MP Anthony Albanese highlighting “the influence of early settlers such as the Schwebel family on the area’s history” whilst presenting a “political snapshot” of ALP history in the area. The Australian Ugliness, in contrast, was a walking tour organised by Thomas Lee in 2016 that offered an insight into the relationships between the visual amenity of the streetscape, aesthetic judgments of an ambiguous nature, and the discursive and archival potentialities afforded by camera-equipped smartphones and photo-sharing services like Instagram. Figure 1: Thomas Lee points out canals under the street of Marrickville during The Australian Ugliness, 2016.Sydney is a city adept at erasing its past through poorly designed mega-projects like freeways and office towers, and memorialisation of lost landscapes has tended towards the literary (Berry; Mudie). Resistance to redevelopment, however, has often taken the form of spectacular public intervention, in which public knowledge sharing was a key goal. The Green Bans of the 1970s were partially spurred by redevelopment plans for places like the Rocks and Woolloomooloo (Cook; Iveson), while the remaking of Sydney around the 2000 Olympics led to anti-gentrification actions such as SquatSpace and the Tour of Beauty, an “aesthetic activist” tour of sites in the suburbs of Redfern and Waterloo threatened with “revitalisation.” Figure 2: "Tour of Beauty", Redfern-Waterloo 2016. What marks the Tour of Beauty as significant in this context is the participatory nature of knowledge production: participants in the tours were addressed by representatives of the local community – the Aboriginal Housing Company, the local Indigenous Women’s Centre, REDWatch activist group, architects, designers and more. Each speaker presented their perspective on the rapidly gentrifying suburb, demonstrating how urban space is made an remade through processes of contestation. This differentiation is particularly relevant when considering the basis for Sydney-centric walking tours. Mirvac’s self-guided tour focuses on the easy-to-see historical “high culture” of Marrickville, and encourages participants to “chat to locals” at the pub. It is a highly filtered approach that does not consider broader relations of class, race and gender that constitute Marrickville. A more intense exploration of the social fabric of the city – providing a glimpse of the hidden or unknown spaces – uncovers the layers of social, cultural, and economic history that produce urban space, and fosters a deeper engagement with questions of urban socio-spatial justice.Solnit argues that walking can allow us to encounter “new thoughts and possibilities.” To walk, she writes, is to take a “subversive detour… the scenic route through a half-abandoned landscape of ideas and experiences” (13). In this way, tactical activist walking tours aim to make visible what cannot be seen, in a way that considers the polysemic nature of place, and in doing so, they make visible the hidden relations of power that produce the contemporary city. In contrast, developer-led walking tours are singularly focussed, seeking to attract inflows of capital to neighbourhoods undergoing “renewal.” These tours encourage participants to adopt the position of urban voyeur, whilst activist-led walking tours encourage collaboration and participation in urban struggles to protect and preserve the contested spaces of the city. It is in this context that we sought to devise our own walking tour – Field Trip – to encourage active participation in issues of urban renewal.In organising this walking tour, however, we acknowledge our own entanglements within processes of gentrification. As designers, musicians, writers, academics, researchers, venue managers, artists, and activists, in organising Field Trip, we could easily be identified as “creatives”, implicated in Marrickville’s ongoing transformation. All of us have ongoing and deep-rooted connections to various Sydney subcultures – the same subcultures so routinely splashed across developer advertising material. This project was borne out of Frontyard – a community not-just-art space, and has been supported by the local Inner West Council. As such, Field Trip cannot be divorced from the highly contentious processes of redevelopment and gentrification that are always simmering in the background of discussions about Marrickville. We hope, however, that in this project we have started to highlight alternative voices in those redevelopment processes – and that this may contribute towards a “method of equality” for an ongoing democratisation of those processes (Davidson and Iveson).Field Trip: Urban Geographical Enquiry as Activism Given this context, Field Trip was designed as a public knowledge project that would connect local residents, workers, researchers, and decision-makers to share their experiences living and working in various parts of Sydney that are undergoing rapid change. The site of our project – Carrington Road, Marrickville in Sydney’s inner-west – has been earmarked for major redevelopment in coming years and is quickly becoming a flashpoint for the debates that permeate throughout the whole of Sydney: housing affordability, employment accessibility, gentrification and displacement. To date, public engagement and consultation regarding proposed development at Carrington Road has been limited. A major landholder in the area has engaged a consultancy firm to establish a community reference group (CRG) the help guide the project. The CRG arose after public outcry at an original $1.3 billion proposal to build 2,616 units in twenty towers of up to 105m in height (up to thirty-five storeys) in a predominantly low-rise residential suburb. Save Marrickville, a community group created in response to the proposal, has representatives on this reference group, and has endeavoured to make this process public. Ruming (181) has described these forms of consultation as “post-political,” stating thatin a universe of consensual decision-making among diverse interests, spaces for democratic contest and antagonistic politics are downplayed and technocratic policy development is deployed to support market and development outcomes.Given the notable deficit of spaces for democratic contest, Field Trip was devised as a way to reframe the debate outside of State- and developer-led consultation regimes that guide participants towards accepting the supposed inevitability of redevelopment. We invited a number of people affected by the proposed plans to speak during the walking tour at a location of their choosing, to discuss the work they do, the effect that redevelopment would have on their work, and their hopes and plans for the future. The walking tour was advertised publicly and the talks were recorded, edited and released as freely available podcasts. The proposed redevelopment of Carrington Road provided us with a unique opportunity to develop and operate our own walking tour. The linear street created an obvious “circuit” to the tour – up one side of the road, and down the other. We selected speakers based on pre-existing relationships, some formed during prior rounds of research (Gibson et al.). Speakers included a local Aboriginal elder, a representative from the Marrickville Historical Society, two workers (who also gave tours of their workplaces), the Lead Heritage Adviser at Sydney Water, who gave us a tour of the Carrington Road pumping station, and a representative from the Save Marrickville residents’ group. Whilst this provided a number of perspectives on the day, regrettably some groups were unrepresented, most notably the perspective of migrant groups who have a long-standing association with industrial precincts in Marrickville. It is hoped that further community input and collaboration in future iterations of Field Trip will address these issues of representation in community-led walking tours.A number of new understandings became apparent during the walking tour. For instance, the heritage-listed Carrington Road sewage pumping station, which is of “historic and aesthetic significance”, is unable to cope with the proposed level of residential development. According to Philip Bennett, Lead Heritage Adviser at Sydney Water, the best way to maintain this piece of heritage infrastructure is to keep it running. While this issue had been discussed in private meetings between Sydney Water and the developer, there is no formal mechanism to make this expert knowledge public or accessible. Similarly, through the Acknowledgement of Country for Field Trip, undertaken by Donna Ingram, Cultural Representative and a member of the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council, it became clear that the local Indigenous community had not been consulted in the development proposals for Carrington Road. This information, while not necessary secret, had also not been made public. Finally, the inclusion of knowledgeable local workers whose businesses are located on Carrington Road provided an insight into the “everyday.” They talked of community and collaboration, of site-specificity, the importance of clustering within their niche industries, and their fears for of displacement should redevelopment proceed.Via a community-led, participatory walking tour like Field Trip, threads of knowledge and new information are uncovered. These help create new spatial stories and readings of the landscape, broadening the scope of possibility for democratic participation in cities. Figure 3: Donna Ingram at Field Trip 2018.Tactical Walking, Tactical Media Stories connected to walking provide an opportunity for people to read the landscape differently (Mitchell). One of the goals of Field Trip was to begin a public knowledge exchange about Carrington Road so that spatial stories could be shared, and new readings of urban development could spread beyond the confines of the self-contained tour. Once shared, this knowledge becomes a story, and once remixed into existing stories and integrated into the way we understand the neighbourhood, a collective spatial practice is generated. “Every story is a travel story – a spatial practice”, says de Certeau in “Spatial Stories”. “In reality, they organise walks” (72). As well as taking a tactical approach to walking, we took a tactical approach to the mediation of the knowledge, by recording and broadcasting the voices on the walk and feeding information to a publicly accessible wiki. The term “tactical media” is an extension of de Certeau’s concept of tactics. David Garcia and Geert Lovink applied de Certeau’s concept of tactics to the field of media activism in their manifesto of tactical media, identifying a class of producers who amplify temporary reversals in the flow of power by exploiting the spaces, channels and platforms necessary for their practices. Tactical media has been used since the late nineties to help explain a range of open-source practices that appropriate technological tools for political purposes. While pointing out the many material distinctions between different types of tactical media projects within the arts, Rita Raley describes them as “forms of critical intervention, dissent and resistance” (6). The term has also been adopted by media activists engaged in a range of practices all over the world, including the Tactical Technology Collective. For Field Trip, tactical media is a way of creating representations that help navigate neighbourhoods as well as alternative political processes that shape them. In this sense, tactical representations do not “offer the omniscient point of view we associate with Cartesian cartographic practice” (Raley 2). Rather these representations are politically subjective systems of navigation that make visible hidden information and connect people to the decisions affecting their lives. Conclusion We have shown that the walking tour can be a tourist attraction, a catalyst to the transformation of urban space through gentrification, and an activist intervention into processes of urban renewal that exclude people and alternative ways of being in the city. This article presents practice-led research through the design of Field Trip. By walking collectively, we have focused on tactical ways of opening up participation in the future of neighbourhoods, and more broadly in designing the city. 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