Postscript

Media, Culture, Technology

Doug Moore

Doug Moore is the talented singer/songwriter for the fast-rising “technical metal” band Pyrrhon. I spoke with him following the release of the band’s latest album ‘What Passes for Survival’ about the human experience of carving out a (sometimes) hospitable piece of the music industry to inhabit. Right now, he’s funding his music career with jobs writing for Clearer Thinking and Stereogum.

This interview took place on August 21st, 2017.

SAM: Besides making music, what do you do for a living?

DOUG: My main source of income is not death metal or deal-metal related (or even music related). Essentially, I am sort of a multi-role writer/researcher and factotum for Clearer Thinking. A succinct summation of what we do is that we advocate for rationality in an effort to encourage better decision-making in people’s daily lives. That’s sort of the elevator pitch for the site.

We create these little automated programs that you can take for free on the site, which mainly are designed to illuminate a concept that we think would be useful for people to apply in their daily lives. An example would be a program we made on the sunk-cost fallacy, which is the idea that basically once you’ve started investing in a project it’s not wise to continue to invest in it just because you have already invested in it, right? Often we get this feeling that we should stop investing, but a lot of people don’t stop, and they don’t for a variety of interesting cognitive reasons. So, in any case, there’s a little program that we made that is sort of like a 45-minute to hour-long explanation of what the sunk cost fallacy is, where you might see it in your daily life, and how you might try to prevent yourself from inadvertently falling prey to it.

Another thing we do is make little widgets that you might be able to use to help make better decisions on a daily basis. One of those that we made that became fairly popular was a little calculator that essentially helped you come up with a estimation for the dollar value of an hour of your free time. We also write blog posts and collaborate with other organizations that are working in the same space, trying to advance a greater interest in rationality and, essentially, sane decision making. *laughs*

SAM: How often do you work at Clearer Thinking? And can you walk me through a typical day of work?

DOUG: I essentially do work 35-40 hours for them most weeks, but I can change that at will by discussing my schedule with my boss.  Most days I sit at home, typing away at my computer in my apartment, then around the early afternoon — between 1:00 and 3:00 — I take a little break and go to gym, then I come back, do a few more hours of work, and then around 6:00 or 7:00 I usually knock off for the day and spend the rest of my free time working on the non-remunerative, creative things I like to do. Most of which are, at this point, making music: working on my vocals and working on my guitar work (I don’t play in my main band, but I do play guitar in one of my other bands and I might help compose for Pyrrhon, the main band).

I also have a side-gig. I do a little bit of…“music criticism” is my high-falutin’ term for it. I currently write a column for Stereogum, which is a mostly pop and indie rock publication, but I do some metal coverage for them. I had previously run a metal blog called “Invisible Oranges,” but I stopped writing there once I’d been doing the column for Stereogum for about a year. Essentially the majority of my day is taken up by Clearer Thinking, and then I will do some logistical stuff for the music writing stuff: corresponding with publicists and talking to my colleagues who will help me with the column and so forth. Most of my generative moments are at night so I use the daytime for the somewhat more quotidian stuff that I do for my main job.

SAM: Where did the name for your band come from?

DOUG: The band name is *laughs* something that I have had a love-hate relationship with over the years. It was essentially a compromise among the people who were in the band when it started — the band formed in 2008 and only two of us remain from those days. But essentially, we kind of backed into it. I didn’t know much about Pyrrhon, the historical philosopher. He’s this radical skeptic, right? He essentially was sort of the original apotheosis of that sort of skepticism. *laughs* I still honestly don’t know all that much about him.

We honestly arrived at the band name because of the way it sounded and looked, I guess — which is one of the reasons why I feel a little ambivalent about it now.  It’s impossible to pronounce or spell, so if we’re going by those metrics it’s not a great choice, but we’re three albums into a career at this point so I think we’re fairly stuck with it. But even though we sort of just backed into this name by bickering amongst ourselves as a bunch of 20-year-olds, the philosophy and lyrical approach of the band is… Well, generally speaking, we subject to criticism the base set of rules that most people seem to operate by, and, in the stuff that we create, a lot of the lyrics are about the more insidious features of daily life in contemporary society. Musically, our approach is, I would say, iconoclastic in a way in that we’re usually trying to upend the apple cart in one way or another.

Pyrrho

SAM: So it seems like there’s actually a fair bit of overlap between your day job and your music, considering that you’re focusing on social structures in both?

DOUG: It has kind of worked out that way. Though not really by design. It’s sort of interesting that you ask this because I don’t talk about my job publicly very often, especially in relation to the band, so I haven’t thought very much about how they’re connected. But I think that you’re probably right in the sense that in both cases I’m thinking about the way things are structured in daily life, looking at what’s going wrong, and asking how things could be made better. I think the specifics of how I’m doing that in my two roles are very different, however, and have almost nothing to do with each other—which may be why I haven’t thought about the connection too much before.

Generally speaking, the band comes from a very emotional, intuitive place. Most of the lyrics are generated automatically—strange phrases that bubble into my subconscious to the point where I become aware of them and isolate them and write them down. Whereas what I’m doing with my job is a much more left-brain sort of thing where I’m thinking analytically (for the most part). There’s a lot of writing involved, but I’m generally trying to write about technical subjects in a way that will allow people to understand them. The  Dionysian impulse that drives my work for the band is not really present in the Clearer Thinking work.

SAM: Your lyrics often seem very literary, for instance in “Mother of Virtues” from Pyrrhon’s second album. You  mentioned that they’re generated automatically, but it seems like you must put a good amount of thought into organizing them.

DOUG: You’re definitely right. I’m not just saying, “Moon, june, spoon— okay, I got the lyrics.” The stuff I write about for the band is very much driven by my own preoccupations personally. So in that sense, there is an element of analytical thought that goes into my attitude about these things, especially since the band is mostly pretty topical. There’s a lot of writing about various social issues involved, but it’s all viewed through the lens of my personal, emotional responses to those things. For example, the song you brought up, “Mother of Virtues,” is explicitly about overpopulation up to a point, right? But it’s not meant to be a polemic where I tell you what to think about overpopulation because I did all the research and here are my conclusions. I mean, it’s a poem essentially. There’s an element of  neurons firing intuitively in my head, and they produce these phrases, which reflect the anxiety and disgust and some other emotions that I have when I really think about overpopulation as a thing that’s actually happening. And I try to arrange these phrases into a song through an iterative process of trying out different stuff. So it’s really hard to draw the line between my left-brain attitudes about the subject and my right-brain process of generating lyrics about it that feel compelling.

 

Sam: So do the lyrics represent your own views? Do you try to account for your bandmates’ views as well?

Doug: As for whether all the lyrics should be taken as literal representations of my attitude, I would say definitely not. In part because there are some lyrics that aren’t written from my perspective — I sometimes do that storytelling-y thing when I write from someone else’s place because I’m ultimately not that interesting where I can carry the whole band with my own special feelings.

“If the question is whether the subject matter is chosen to evoke an aesthetic effect that matches the band, the answer is no. There’s a ton of me in the lyrics.”

If the question is whether the subject matter is chosen to evoke an aesthetic effect that matches the band, the answer is no. There’s a ton of me in the lyrics. That’s one of the things that I really try to strive for, actually, because so many metal lyrics are incredibly impersonal, either because they’re just poorly written or because the approach of the lyricist is to, you know, speak in the voice of an omniscient third-party narrator who’s describing this or that. A lot of times in metal lyrics you get the voice of God describing some evil and that’s not my approach at all, I really try to invest myself.

As to whether they reflect the views of the band, I would say that, broadly speaking, the answer is yeah. To the extent that Pyrrhon has a political perspective, we’re all pretty much on the same page. I would say that I’m probably marginally more engaged in that stuff than the rest of the band, but they’re all definitely paying attention. They’re all readers, you know, they’re an astute bunch of guys. But there’s not really a lot of give and take in that stuff. In some ways the attitudes of my bandmates affect what I write lyrically because I’m around them all the time — we talk about the issues as a band. *laughs* And I’m also thinking about my bandmates, thinking about their musicianship — I’m often writing to music they’ve written — so of course their attitudes will come through in the lyrics to a degree. At the same time, I don’t really consult anyone with what I write. Everyone’s usually like “that’s good!” and that’s the extent of the feedback that I get from them. If I said something that someone really didn’t agree with, they would say “I really don’t want to be associated with that sentiment,” but that’s never happened before.

 

Sam: Knowing Pyrrhon’s taste for compositional complexity, how do you go about putting your lyrics to music?

Doug: So in  the case of Pyrrhon, getting the music and lyrics together into one cohesive thing is especially challenging because the music, even by the standards of the genre, is really challenging and complex. So as a result, in the early stages of the band, there was a really steep learning curve for figuring out how to write lyrics in a way that made sense with the actual song structures. That was made even more difficult because I’m an asshole and wanted to do something ambitious with the lyrics and have some poetic “friscon” or whatever. It was also really important to me that they looked good on the page, too, because when I was growing up as a fan of music, I would often hear a song that I liked and then look at the lyrics on the page and just think that it looked like a child wrote them.” Lyrics for rock music often look really clunky and awkward when you just read them out of context from the music. I wanted to get around that problem and that was easier when you were able to write in a consistent, regular meter. Pyrrhon can’t often do that because the music is just not like that, essentially.

“I often ending up choosing to pick things because I’m worked up into an emotional tizzy about some thing or another and I’m like “gotta get it out!'”

So the way that it ends up working is that there are two parallel processes that go on when putting the whole package together. The music generally grows up independently of the lyrics, so when we’re working on material for a new release, I start taking little notes in my mind about lyrical ideas that I have — just phrases that strike me or topics that I think we could do a whole song about, etc. In the meantime, we start composing the actual instrumental material, and as the sketches of the lyrics grow up, and as we get to the point of needing vocals for a composition that we’re relatively close to being able to perform, I’ll select one of the candidates that I’ve built for that release and pair it with the composition we’re working on. I’ll try to pick either the one that the music seems best suited for or whatever one I really want to write about at that time. I often ending up choosing to pick things because I’m worked up into an emotional tizzy about some thing or another and I’m like “gotta get it out!” so sometimes a song will get that lyric because that’s what I had to do at that moment.

So then it becomes a process of elaborating on a lyric and structuring it in a way that makes sense with the composition. In order for me to do that, I need to have a strong sense of the way that the composition works and what all the parts are, so often when we’re in practice just working on the music, I won’t have anything to do yet, so I’ll just sit there and watch the band play the song over and over and over again until I understand all the rhythmic ins and outs. So then, when I understand where I want the vocals to go, I’ll just try doing some death metal scat vocals over the music *laughs* where I just try to block in some ideas for where the lyrics are going to go. At the same time I’m developing a clearer idea for the structure of the lyrics in my head.

It sounds pretty involved, I guess, when I describe it (and I guess it is pretty involved). Basically there’s just this long, mutative process of taking these two threads — the lyrical idea that I had at some point and the compositional idea of the song — and gradually integrating them through lots of repeated listenings to the song and thinking about… what the lyrics and shit-, I don’t know. *laughs* It’s not really that interesting in theory, it’s basically just a thing that grows into itself with some coaxing from us.

 

Sam: So, I’m sure you get asked this all the time but, how do you avoid absolutely destroying your voice?

Doug

Doug: The answer that I always give to this question is: “with difficulty.” Just because it is pretty fuckin’ hard for me to do. Some people just naturally have a voice that is well suited to projecting lots of volume all the time and you can just go on living your rock and roll lifestyle and smoking tons and drinking tons and is totally fine the next day for you to just sing again. I am not that person, honestly. If you had told me even probably just ten years ago that I was ever going to have any renown as a vocalist of any kind, I would have thought you were crazy, because I don’t really have a naturally powerful voice. So I had to go to some lengths to sustain my voice for every show. There’s a bunch of things that go into it — one thing I do is practice a lot to strengthen my voice. A lot of metal vocalists seemingly just don’t practice — they’re just naturally able to do it. Must be nice for them, but I’m not like that. I warm up a lot and try to use good technique. Even with screaming, there is a lot of technique to it, a lot of which overlaps with conventional singing. You know: you need to use proper diaphragm support, and not get out of breath, and all of these things that keep you in the right physical posture while you’re performing. Other than that I try to not yell and scream too much when I’m not on stage and keep the partying to a minimum. I like to drink beer, like many people in bands, but on tour I don’t drink very much — I’ll have a beer or two, but I don’t really get drunk — which is, in the world of metal (as you can imagine), a little out of the ordinary. Another things that’s really important is sleeping a lot. When you’re asleep, your voice is being rested and that’s the time that you get the most recovery. So I try to sleep as much as I can, which can be kind of difficult on the road when you’re crashing on floors and doing long drives, but it is doable. It’s been a long learning process which has featured me losing my voice at many inopportune moments, but at this point I’ve mostly figured it out and it’s relatively rare that I have vocal problems.

I would say that compared to the average singer in a metal band, the thing that makes my vocal approach stand out is that I tend to code switch a lot (I guess would be one way to put it). There is a pretty broad range of screaming and yelling that you hear in metal, but usually in a given band you usually only hear like one or two. You’ll get the low beefy-sounding roar or you’ll get a high goblin voice, or you’ll get a guy who sounds like he’s in a hardcore band who’s doing the screamo thing. My approach involves jumping between lots of these different registers. I’ve got five or six and I’ve got a multi-effects pedal that I use, so there’s a lot of textural changes in what I do. Really the process of learning how to do that was just a lot of trial and error.

 

Sam: Knowing how much work it would take, when did you really commit to metal?

Doug: When I was a teenager, I knew I was interested in being a musician, so I was playing guitar, but I could already tell at that time that I wasn’t going to be a virtuoso, it didn’t come too naturally to me, so I started messing around with vocals just to see if I could do it, essentially. Over the years, I would practice my vocals by trying to imitate different records that I heard. I listened to a pretty broad range of “heavy music,” as they called it, and in my listening, I noticed that a lot of different metal singers would have different ticks and little foibles to the way they delivered words and I found that I could get a pretty broad range of different voices just by imitating different ticks. So in a way, I learned by doing impressions of different people, and in doing that I learned what my voice was capable of — which different things I could do well, which different things I thought sounded distinctive when I did them, which things I felt like had character or emotional expressiveness to them (not all these styles are especially expressive) — and eventually I started performing in different bands and trying out different styles. Eventually, I just developed a vocabulary for doing it. I wasn’t ever really trained or anything like that, I just winged it and blew my voice out a ton of times and eventually figured out what I was doing.

 

Sam: You’ve been getting a lot of positive coverage lately, does seeing that sort of envigorate you?

Doug: This is what I think of whenever I see a positive review: “it’s really cool that you like it, but I don’t think it’s the best thing we’re ever going to do, hopefully it will be blown out of the water by future Pyrrhon records.” I mean, it’s been gratifying to see the reaction, it’s been hard for me to tell how well it’s doing in the grand scheme of things, because positive critical feedback isn’t necessarily indicative of any public interest, especially in a very niche culture like metal, where the people who are writing about it are really intense hobbyists who are doing it for free, who have these very abstruse, long-tailed tastes that are highly specific and so far out from the normal of what anyone even in metal really listens to. *laughs* It’s totally unclear to me whether the enthusiasm amongst music writers is reflected by broader enthusiasm, but certainly our shows recently have been better attended than they were on the last record cycle. I think a big part of it is just that we’ve been plugging away for a while and have a little name recognition, so when the new record came out, people were immediately more receptive to it, it’s like the mere familiarity effect — there’s something from my job.*laughs*

 

Sam: I saw a particularly nasty YouTube comment that equated listening to a song off of Mother of Virtues to forcible prison sodomy. 

Doug: *laughs* I think I saw that too.

Sam: How do you feel about that sort of ‘feedback’?

Doug: It’s true, YouTube is generally the place we get slammed the most, which I kind of relish, honestly. I have like a perverse love for really excessively negative feedback on Pyrrhon, mostly on the grounds that it’s a metal band that’s influenced by punk and harsh noise and all of these genres that are (in my mind) supposed to be antagonistic and offensive to people’s ears a lot of the time, right? So, rather than seeing a wall of, “it’s pretty good”s, I would rather have people hate my shit and think it’s repulsive and objectionable — that’s a lot closer to the reaction that I would have envisioned from people when I started doing this shit. It’s supposed to be antagonistic, it’s supposed to have an element of “fuck you” to it and I think that gets lost in a lot of metal bands in general. A lot of bands just seem like they want to be liked by everybody and that’s just not what we’re about.

“Yeah. Yeah we got called a ‘blight’ and I was like, ‘sick.'”

 

Sam: What are your thought’s about Pyrrhon’s place in music knowing that you’re getting a good amount of critical attention and acclaim while  you all still need to work two jobs.

Doug: Um, let me think about that for a second. I feel like I would be remiss in complaining about Pyrrhon’s place in anything ever. Given what we’re doing, I think it’s really a privilege to have any audience whatsoever — the band is substantially more popular than I ever thought it would be. I kind of thought it was just going to be this sort of garage project for eternity that might’ve had a few fans, but wouldn’t really ever go anywhere. So, the broadest part of the reaction is that I’m really grateful to be a part of the conversation and have people listening to our music, even (and sometimes especially) if they find it really revolting or, a “blight in the face of metal,” as I saw this one blog today put it. Yeah. Yeah we got called a “blight” and I was like, “sick.” I would say that relative to my attitudes about music, a lot of people in the metal world seem to be very conservative — really interested in hearing the same few ideas that were conceived in the ‘80s and ‘90s (and ‘70s even) repeated in like a catechism to the way things used to be. As someone who’s trying to do something more inventive and left-field, I would prefer there to be more people who were receptive to that sort of thing, but that’s simply not how it is and that’s not how I would expect it to be, either. So, given the antagonistic and deliberately difficult nature of the project, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how many people have been willing to give it a shot and do what’s required and see past the initial shock of the chaotic nature of the music.

 

Sam: [Some bullshit, two minute long question about how both horror movies and metal are both intended to disturb, but horror is more accepted by the mainstream. I forget. It was one of those things where I thought I was on some next-level shit at the time, but it was really dumb in retrospect.]

Doug: I would disagree a little bit with your evaluation of the aims and means of both of those styles. If you consider horror movies that do well and also most metal records that do well, they’re both pretty populist in nature, as well. Successful horror movies have clear, conventional narrative arcs that are designed to draw in viewers and compel them to care about the participants and the plot, and there’s a lot of window dressing to make them look cool. The desire to disturb and upset is an element of what they’re trying to accomplish, but it’s also set within the framework of a relatively straightforward piece of cinematic entertainment. There’s a reason why horror movies often aren’t thought of as being as prestigious as drama — it’s schelacky, it’s low-brow fun for the masses. A lot of that stuff applies to most conventionally-styled classical metal as well — it’s mostly, essentially really a form of pop music, with verse, chorus song structures that are built around clear, direct melodies. If you think about Metallica, right? All the classic metal bands, they’re rock bands, they’re playing a form of rock music that is essentially designed to be catchy and entertaining, even though there is an element of horror or anger that is the emotional locus of the art, it’s still in a digestible package. I think that what Pyrrhon is doing is more like a pompous, obnoxious art flick that, if if it has a plot, it’s buried under multiple layers of weirdness and you can’t tell what’s going on, and it really makes you feel like bad to watch it a lot of the time — it doubles down on the evocation of disgust and fear and all these other things, as opposed to having a bright, catchy melody that has some more minor notes to it. Hopefully, if you’re going to listen a couple times and do the work you’ll be able to get stuff out of it, and I think that’s why people are responding to the new record, but for both the Erasorhead type of movie and the Pyrrhon type of band, there are going to be a lot of people who are just gonna go, “nope, fuck that, I hate it” and that’s fine — it’s partially designed to get that kind of response too. In the more conventional metal band, there’s a balance of the desire to appeal and the desire to repel, whereas in a band like Pyrrhon, we’re not necessarily saying “we’re going to make music that no one likes,” but we are doing something that’s really weird and designed to be confusing and painful to listen to sometimes, and some people (like us) are masochists musically who like that kind of thing, and a lot of people are not.

 

Sam: What are the aims of the band?

band

Pyrrhon is a thing that pays only for itself… sometimes.”

Doug: From the very beginning of the band, we have all been under the understanding that Pyrrhon is not designed to remunerate. If it does make any money — which at this point it does — the money is just re-invested into further band stuff. Pyrrhon is a thing that pays only for itself… sometimes.*laughs* So as a result, we’ve all had to do different things with out lives that allow us to pursue the band. We all have day jobs, 3/4 of us live in very expensive urban areas, we all have to make sacrifices with our lifestyles for our jobs, which are all more flexible types of things which allow us to tour and what have you. We all have to eat some shit to make this thing work. We all have to be frugal and take jobs that will let us tour — and that’s usually not a very well-paying job — and we live in expensive places. So it’s not easy to make it work, but we have done it so far and the reward we have from doing that is being able to do literally whatever the fuck we want artistically, which is more than rewarding enough to justify all the decisions we made to make that possible.

 

Sam: So I saw that you took the Chinatown bus from UPenn to NYC just so you could practice with Pyrrhon. That stuck out to me as a super interesting experience and I was wondering if you would care to expound on it.

Doug: I guess “fortunately” would be the correct word, I never saw anything too crazy. There were a lot of people who were messed up on drugs, but there were no real Canadian decapitation incident type happenings. No busses ever caught on fire, which is actually a thing that happens with Chinatown busses pretty frequently. I don’t think I ever saw anyone even barf on one of those busses, which was kind of a miracle given — especially back in those days — who was taking them. That at this point is far enough ago that it seems like it’s quite far in the rearview for me, but when I think about that period it gives me a bit of a nostalgic kick. On the face of it, doing that in college as a committed student who worked pretty hard in school was kind of crazy upon reflection. It was really a huge investment of time and not always the most fun thing to be doing during my Saturday —  sometimes I would even do it during the week, take a day when I got out of classes early, practice for two and a half hours then run right back to the bus all sweaty. But at the time I remember thinking “okay, you’ve always wanted to be in a band, these guys are pretty talented, this might be your only opportunity to ever do this, even to the point where you could play live shows and maybe even go on a tour someday. There were times in the early days of the band where to commit to it like I did seemed like it might have been a mistake, but fortunately, I feel like we’ve gotten to a point where I get a warm fuzzy thinking about that one; I feel like I made the right choice.

I would say that the thing that I treasure the most about my experience with the band is tied directly to that kind of memory. We put so much of ourselves into doing it and we had to do so many stupid little tasks, like the DIY band things like hand-assembling record or thinking about the logistics of trying to get to this place or that. When I think about all the shit we did to finally have these little artifacts of our labor, these physical copies of the records — whenever I see the first copy of a new record and think about everything that went into it to create something that someone else can experience and hopefully take something productive away from, it’s really… there’s nothing else like it for me. It’s the best feeling, it means everything to me.      *puts down mug*

Album Cover for 'The Mother of Virtues'

 

Reddit: ‘The Front Page of the Internet’

With an attitude reflecting its titular play on the phrase “read it,” Reddit remains an anomaly in an age where websites are flooded with eye-catching animations. Going against the sentiment that a picture speaks a thousand words, Reddit is a deconstruction of what popular culture finds noteworthy. Though visitors can find pictures, videos, GIFs, or any visual media on the site, its appeal lies elsewhere. Greeting its visitors with only unappealing bright blue text, Reddit evokes the rudimentary simplicity of the early days of the internet, yet, it’s actually hyper-modern.

Despite being the 10th most trafficked website in the United States (ahead of Netflix, Pinterest, and the New York Times), Reddit is mostly shielded from the aggressive marketing campaigns and pop-up ads that haunt much of today’s internet. This virtue, free from industrial constraints, perhaps is not as surprising as it might seem. Developed by two college dorm-mates in 2005, Reddit has predominantly been unaffected by exterior conditions. Expanding on their own even after being purchased by parent company Condé, Reddit was developed by cofounders Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman. Together, the duo devised a platform that gave users the ability to own the site. To understand this dynamic, here are some important terms that are representative of Reddit’s structure as defined by Reddit’s own glossary:

                   Mod – Moderator of a subReddit. They have the power to remove comments and posts, among other                                            things.

                   Reddiquette – Refers to the rules of Reddit, the rules of a specific subReddit, or less commonly to                                                                 unwritten guidelines of conduct followed by typical Redditors.

                   Sub – An individual subReddit. Note: all of Reddit’s content is posted to individual subReddits that are                                    meticulously monitored. Comments/posts reach Reddit’s front page when they garner a                                                    significant amount of up-votes from other users.

Perhaps more dependent on their users than most businesses, Reddit’s content is generated by the people, for the people. Ideally, it is representative of contemporary interests at any moment of the day. Combining its global reach with the rawest form of democracy (the ability to up-vote or down-vote any post), Reddit is unrestricted, brutally honest, and often crude. To this extent, Reddit is one of the internet’s most candid representations of humanity. People, as Reddit’s cofounders note, are not perfect. “Out of 170 million people [on Reddit], we’re probably talking about fewer than 10,000 bad people.” As an avenue for human expression that is illustrative of a startling a 170 million monthly users, Reddit is an apex of human interaction. Maintaining this identity, here are five things you need to know about Reddit’s important role in the internet world:

  • Reddit is hard to monetize and market.
  • Reddit’s credo of free speech drives its conceptual framework.
  • Reddit serves as a source for much of the internet’s published content.
  • Reddit would not exist without its moderators.
  • Reddit’s users have developed a culture of authenticity.

 

  1. Reddit is hard to monetize and market.

reddit demographics

Though the website is accessed by a variety of users, most of them are males between 13 and 35. This relatively homogeneous consumer base that predominantly frequents gaming, sports, and other typically masculine pages makes Reddit a tough sell for companies whose products apply more broadly. Further complicating Reddit’s pitch to potential advertisers, users only spend an average of 15 minutes and 40 seconds on the site and 90% of the site’s guests do not make a Reddit account. Because of the brevity of most of Reddit’s visits, generating traffic with predictable users is not easy. This poses a real concern to companies seeking to advertise on Reddit’s site.

Cofounder Steve Huffman has noted that Reddit is a ten-year-old company conducting itself like a newborn. Though he predicts that his return to the company (following a brief hiatus) will yield commercial improvements, progress will be difficult. As he admits, his primary initiative is to rebuild Reddit’s corporate team following years of Reddit-related scandal and subpar management. When asked how Reddit will achieve commercial relevance, Huffman announced that financial concerns will have to come after Reddit corrects its corporate infrastructure, not before it.

Despite Huffman’s aspirations, Reddit faces a long road to sustained profitability that may not be traversable. According to Seth Fiegerman’s spotlight on Reddit, the site has not been able to convert user traffic into profit despite garnering hundreds of millions of users worldwide. In fact, several studies on Reddit’s commercial value have noted that it only generated $8.6 million in ads in 2014. In comparison to another top-trafficked site, Amazon reportedly registered over $600 million in ad revenue in 2012. Both sites having similar numbers of visitors, it is seemingly odd that Reddit would fall hundreds of millions of dollars behind in ad revenue. However, this disparity isn’t at all surprising to market experts.

As an ex-employee stated, Reddit has fundamental convictions on how they believe sensitive user details should be protected. Because of this concern, Reddit asks for no personal information to sign up; all that is required is an original username and password. As a result, an architecture predicated on anonymity is hard to sell. While Reddit understands that advertisers want explicit information in order to create targeted ads, it has pioneered alternative methods to generate revenues. Explored in a report by Bloomberg Businessweek, Reddit has enacted a unique ad module and offers companies the ability to purchase ad space on a flat fee. In doing so, advertisers can target Reddit users from particular cities or countries. Additionally, instead of selling general real-estate on the homepage or sidebars, Reddit has considered allowing companies to advertise products on specific subReddits. For example, the subReddit r/baseball might present ads from Nike Baseball. Similarly, r/swimming would display concentrated Speedo promotions. Although this concept is being refined, it provides the specific user data that advertisers have sought from Reddit since its rapid ascent. Still, Reddit is a long way away from market relevance. Until the company is able to juggle its fierce protection of privacy with the need to monetize, Reddit will remain an afterthought in a giant, saturated market.

 

  1. Reddit’s credo of free speech drives its conceptual framework.

In the site’s own words, “Reddit bridges communities and individuals with ideas, the latest digital trends, and breaking news (…okay, and maybe cats). Our mission is to help people discover places where they can be their true selves, and empower our community to flourish.” This “trueness of self” is integral to Reddit’s framework; however, it is one of its most notable flaws. While subReddits such as r/cats, r/dogs, and r/math innocently exist, the subReddits r/SexyAbortions, r/ChokeABitch, and r/HurtingAnimals operate without much restraint as well. Because users are nearly entirely anonymous, many feel empowered to frequent these channels without any consequences. Although Reddit acknowledges the existence of hateful pages, they maintain that Reddit does not exist to ban ideas. Instead, choosing to merely monitor conduct, Reddit only reprimands users if they spread offensive content outside of their isolated circles. In short, until user conduct directly affects Redditors from unrelated subReddits, Reddit’s most controversial pages are allowed to exist.

To thwart these pages, Reddit has created “Quarantine Zones” where only users with email verified Reddit accounts can access pages flagged for provocative material. However, most efforts to purge Reddit of offensive groups has been deemed an infringement on free speech and is met with opposition even from those who do not engage with them. Though most Redditors agree that r/HurtingAnimals is distasteful, they insist that the protection of all speech is paramount. Sacrificing Reddit’s integrity is out of the question. Recognizing this point, users are often aware of the effect they can have on Reddit. In truth, Redditors run Reddit. Consequently, combining complete free speech with the internet has yielded glaring negatives; however, positive initiatives have surfaced from Reddit’s communities too.

Noted in a study in the Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, Reddit has over 668 million comments, 255,671 authors, and more than 70 million submissions. Although posts vary from hateful rhetoric to kitten pictures, Reddit regularly fosters dialogue that affects the real world. With so many voices projected from millions of angles, the world’s pressing issues are often deliberated. Unlike the dark side of Reddit, these discussions often have impressively virtuous aims. Examples include a successful 2014 campaign to find one user’s father who, while battling illness and confusion, had disappeared. Others include the funding of a toy shopping spree for a young girl battling cancer, and an annual Secret Santa that recently broke the Guinness world record for largest gift exchange.

In addition to these charitable efforts, Reddit is increasingly used as an information hub for the sciences. Because internet platforms like Reddit are readily consumed by millions, one journal on emerging technologies indicates they are ideal settings to promote STEM fields. The article, noting the words of Van Riper, writes that “popular culture probably does more than formal science education to shape most people’s understanding of science and scientists. It is more pervasive, more eye-catching, and (with rare exceptions) more memorable.” In this vein Reddit seeks to provide intriguing information from all fields and to be a forum for global topics. With any user able to engage in discussion, whether ethical or not, Reddit promotes extensive user discourse.

 

  1. Reddit serves as a source for much of the internet’s published content.

subreddits

As the “front page of the internet,” Reddit often is responsible for dictating what is popular. Although other mediums influence what news sources choose to publish, none offer material that is as globally extensive and concisely listed according to popularity as Reddit. A complicated position to be in, Reddit’s relationship with the rest of the media world has left its leader, cofounder Alexis Ohanian, as the widely embraced “Mayor of the Internet.” Ohanian, starting Reddit with Steve Huffman after a $12,000 investment from Y Combinator, has cultivated a culture where it is not only easy to discover popular content, but to encounter novel content as well.

Emphasizing concision, Reddit has perfected the art of displaying a lot of information in not a lot of room. Since Reddit serves as an indicator for what is “hot” at any moment, news outlets often poach their content from the “Reddit-sphere.” As reported by The New Statesman, Reddit has a trickle-down effect on internet reporting. Frequently, articles found on sites like Buzzfeed or Vice directly originate from Reddit’s reservoirs. While this dynamic takes shape in the form of recycled stories, it includes the reposting (emphasis on “re”) of memes (pictures with typically witty and effective captions) as well.

However, in 2015, Reddit’s role was fully appreciated. After a widely-beloved employee was terminated, Reddit’s moderators initiated a boycott. Refusing to post new threads and blocking off many of the site’s avenues, moderators successfully shut down three quarters of Reddit. The protest shocked the media. As Time‘s Matt Vella wrote in his piece on Reddit’s revival, Reddit sits as the source for “your mom’s Facebook post,” thus, with the disappearance of 75% of Reddit’s substance, the blogs, quirky articles, “morning television fodder,” and Twitter hashtags that influence “your mom’s” posts vanished. As an effect of the user demonstration, Buzzfeed, the Independent, and other trendy news sources went literally quiet for several days. This reaction symbolizes Reddit’s effect on the greater internet culture. Because it is the leading consolidation of what is deemed “worth reading,” internet media outlets depend on Reddit as a resource; without it, viral news sites would not able to routinely generate their content as simply as they do.

 

  1. Reddit would not exist without its moderators.

Moderators are a group of user volunteers that oversee specific subReddits. Though moderators have tenuous access to the Administrators at Reddit’s corporate offices who sometimes advise them on how to moderate, there exists a substantial disconnect between the two groups. Because moderator work is voluntary and without much guidance, its duties are often demanding. Reporting on the complications of the moderator-corporate relationship, Bloomberg Businessweek indicates that Reddit’s site is one of the least controllable domains in Internet history. Because there is no sponsored handbook or code for moderators to follow, their responsibilities are freestyled.

Reddit’s lack of structure for its unpaid workers makes it impossible for them to know what kind of policies to follow. As a result, moderators make their own rules that vary from page to page. For example, community rules on the popular r/gaming subReddit consists of regulations that prevent users from trading video game products in addition to warnings that racist, sexist, homophobic, or threatening content posted to the community will be removed. Other subReddits like r/Worldnews post rules disallowing articles from Twitter/Facebook, non-English stories, or editorials. While a general Reddiquite is sought to be maintained throughout all subReddits, moderators tediously govern on their own accord.

As Gideon Grudo notes in his article in Quill, moderating any subReddit requires substantial labor. Although some moderators assume the role out of devotion to Reddit’s culture, it seems they do more important work than can be reasonably expected of a volunteer. After all, they are the mainstay of Reddit’s longevity. In other corporate contexts, using free labor to propel a company’s business is considered corrupt. In Reddit’s case, they are fortunate that they have gotten so far without being asked to compensate the individuals that manage and create their product. Though moderators ideally do interact with paid admins at Reddit’s corporate office, communication is meager.

After years of asking for better conditions to run their communities, moderators’ patience is running thin. Grievances such as calls for better search and messaging tools to prevent spam have been met with inadequate responses from the admittedly small Reddit team. According to one moderator who oversees the r/walkingdead and r/engineering communities, Reddit “takes the users and moderators for granted, assuming they will continue doing what they’ve been doing for years.” This is a dangerous assumption for Reddit to make, as strenuous unpaid labor has a history of igniting revolution. Although an internet revolution perhaps is less significant than more historically important ones, the Reddit-Moderator relationship certainly has the fixings of a messy fall-out if improvements are not installed.

 

  1. Reddit’s users have developed a culture of authenticity.

reddit post

Besides their fierce defense of free speech, Reddit has operated as a domain where users feel comfortable being themselves. In one interview with Alexis Ohanian, he revealed that Reddit is where “real [identities]” come out. He asserts that “Reddit is going to continue growing because people are desperate for the authenticity that it allows.” As a result, Reddit has manufactured a space for sincere interaction. Because there are no limits to what can be discussed, all potential users are able to engage with uniquely cohesive communities. This dynamic is crucial to Reddit’s cultural significance. While the internet, especially in current social media age, are often mediums for individuality and materialism, Reddit has defiantly groomed contending values. Allowing users to express their personae intellectually rather than via a “like” or a “follow,” Reddit is dependent on a series of “anti-values” writes Jillian Goodman. Refusing to berate users with ads or promote a culture of consumerist tenors, Reddit exists as a safe space for those who seek to step away from the implications of a social media dominated society.

The result of these defiant “anti-values” has led to Reddit’s complicated corporate history. One event to note is Yishan Wong’s brief stint as Reddit’s CEO. After Reddit became an independent company in 2012, hundreds of qualified candidates were considered; however, none screamed “Reddit” as through-and-through as Wong. Wong, as described by Seth Fiegerman’s Mashable spotlight, had a conviction to ensure that nobody was going to dilute his beloved site. A Redditor since its earliest beginnings, Wong was a Reddit purist. Although he resigned as CEO after a couple years (due to personality flaws rather than an inability to run the company), his stretch as CEO represents the larger Reddit user culture. According to Fiegerman, Wong “didn’t need a big paycheck…and didn’t seek out fame or media attention.” Instead, Wong “worked at Reddit for Reddit.”

This notion of doing service “for Reddit” is the same logic that moderators employ to justify their lack of financial compensation. For Redditors, Reddit in itself is a gift. Reddit offers users a chance to unapologetically be themselves, and, because of this, the site is unapologetically human. Often ranging from virtuous to disgusting, Reddit provides a glimpse into the core of unadulterated humanity.

Romanticism and Change in Chance the Rapper’s ‘Same Drugs’

When I first listened to Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book, I thought it was a pretty lackluster save for one song. My judgment may have been a little harsh, since I was comparing it to Chance’s previous mixtape Acid Rap (which I’ve  come to realize I’d romanticized and so had downplayed its flaws in my memory) and the two are very different albums born of different circumstances. I love Acid Rap’s consistent tone, I think that’s really what rewards listening to it all the way through and solidifies the album as one concrete thing to me. While the same can’t be said of Coloring Book, it was a major studio release while Acid Rap was just a mixtape, so it was obviously made over a much longer period of time and there was likely a much greater dispersal of artistic control. Chance also had access to new collaborators and so wanted to experiment with new sounds, which is admirable. It would have been disappointing if he tried to replicate Acid Rap, but I still can’t help but missing that unique, consistent mood. When I first listened to “Same Drugs,” I remember thinking that it was “hands down” his best song ever — an honor that, upon reflection, I’d still apply to it. I thought it not only extended the style that I’d come to associate with Chance, but expanded on it, which is strange considering how different it is from every other song he’s made. So why such high praise?

Before continuing, it’s worth considering that question as more than just a rhetorical transition. I do think it’s fairly curious that I like this song so much. It’s definitely somewhat of a departure from the carefree, fast-paced, acid-drenched style that made Acid Rap so memorable. I think my general notion of the idea of what an artist’s “best song” is is that it’s the best example of their trademark style, but this isn’t the case with “Same Drugs,” a slow-paced, sung piano ballad that, despite its title, is among the more sober songs on the album. All that being said, what’s truly incredible is that despite the fact that Chance eschews all of his traditional stylistic elements, the song is inexorably and immediately identifiable as a “Chance the Rapper” song. The fact that Chance took the effort to find the proper style to house this song and execute it well, a style which wound up being a departure from his norm, gives me the impression that the song’s attempt to evoke emotion must be sincere. Chance didn’t make a ballad for the sake of making a ballad, he made this song a ballad because that’s what he needed to do to make it function properly. Anything resulting from that sort of decision making is clearly trying to communicate something and so becomes recognizably genuine and communicates what it tries to more effectively for that genuineness. When art comes from a sincere place, it creates its own positive feedback loop — a phenomenon that I think is beautiful in itself. Essentially, I’m saying that the reason why I think it’s weird that I like the song so much (that it’s such a departure from Chance’s style) is the reason why I like it so much.

So how is this song so different from Chance’s others? Chance the Rapper is, as his name would suggest, a rapper and it is worth noting that “Same Drugs” is entirely sung (that being said, per Chano on “Smoke Again”: “she like when I rap raps, but better when I sing songs”). It’s not that singing is out of his wheelhouse, but rather that he generally sings in only (seemingly skill-confined) short bursts. When Chance is rapping, he has a melodic, potentially booming voice that can articulate clearly at high speeds while still maintaining his cadence and signature raspy style. His singing voice, however, is small, gentle, and sort of timid. His raspiness and playful delivery give his voice an air of fragility —  it feels as if he’s barely maintaining each note he sings and is trying his very hardest to keep from slipping off-key, but still attempts daring feats, reaching far into both extremes of his range, like a tightrope walker who can barely keeps his balance walking down the rope before attempting a front flip, his arms flailing wildly all the while. Beyond the stunt-pilot spectacle this fragility brings, his hesitant timbre also excellently evokes his character. While he may not be a fantastic singer by professional standards, his voice seems to be alive with his intimately-shorn, well-articulating personality, breathing naked life into whatever he sings.

In addition to his prolonged singing, the soft piano music is also uncharacteristic of Chance. The phrase “Chance the Rapper instrumental” has come to evoke horns, low-fi generic drums, and pitched and layered vocals, but the instrumental here creates a wildly different, pared-back mood that still jives well with the smokiness of the rest of the album. But if the resonant low-keys, decay-snipped twig claps, and off-kilter base melody on “All Night” elicit an alcoholic haze, the piano in “Same Drugs,” which is later accompanied by strings and a dreamy vocal distortion, communicates a haze of nostalgic simplicity and childhood innocence.

To return to my contradictory assessment of my enjoyment of “Same Drugs” and phrase it in a non-contradictory way: I think an artist’s best song is the best example of their style. Chance’s style is defined by his his personality. This song is outside his traditional style but has a heartfelt message and so it seems like an effort to communicate a sincere part of himself. Since it’s both so different and sincere, it defines Chance more completely than any of his other songs and so, in a counter-intuitive way, is the best example of Chance’s self-articulating style.

The cover of "Acid Rap"

You may be thinking that my musings about sincerity are all well and good, but why talk about why I like “Same Drugs” now? Coloring Book was released all the way back in the May of 2016, so this reflection isn’t exactly timely. The music video for “Same Drugs” was, however, released this February and got me thinking about the song again (granted, February was five months ago, so that retort doesn’t make the circumstance much less weird. The truth is that I wanted to write something back in February and decided to write it now on a whim). The video features a slightly different version of the song, which has expanded vocals from Eryn Allen Kane, Yebba, John Legend, Francis Starlite and Macie Stewart. Eryn Allen Kane’s vocals now stretch beyond their initial confinement of the choir and stand by themselves alongside Chance’s, transforming the song into a duet. When I first saw the video, which is directed by Jake Schreier, I was thrown by this change, along with the video itself (which I will get to), as they slightly morphed how I perceived the meaning of the song.

The original version of “Same Drugs” feels like a deeply personal solo ballad in which Chance is singing to a former childhood friend. The song utilizes an extended Peter Pan metaphor, likening the way that this childhood friend has grown up and apart from Chance to the way that Wendy grew old while Peter remained the same — the title referring to the fact that they no longer share the same interests, values, or outlooks. The song is sung by Chance from the imagined perspective of this friend, making the song a lamentation on the way he’s all but disappeared in her eyes — as if Wendy held onto Peter’s shadow to remember him by but wound up forgetting what the real him was like. Because this woman has Chance’s “shadow,” he knows she’s thinking of him and it pains him to imagine her memories of him remaining intact but decreasing in significance with each passing day. A part of him, his shadow, belongs to her and because she no longer holds dear what she used to, that part of him is all but worthless.

In the video, the weight of this knowledge is represented literally. As the video opens, Chance sits behind a piano with a giant, freakily glitter-glossed diva muppet — a stand in for Wendy — resting uncomfortably on his shoulder. He sings his way through the opening chorus and verse, glancing over at the muppet with a look of anxious frustration from time to time. Then, all of a sudden, when the second chorus kicks in, the muppet springs up and begins singing, sometimes in unison with Chance, other times trading lines with him, flipping the original lines from the third person to the first (e.g. “she don’t” becomes “I don’t”).

After the second verse, she flops back down on Chance’s shoulder, dormant again. He resumes looking annoyedly over at (and away from) her and, after a couple attempts to shrug her off, stands up, letting her flop down on the ground. That moment, where he let the stupid-looking muppet flop on the ground, is where my interpretation of the video really changed from that of the song.

Chance standing in stars.

I viewed the song as holding up meditation on nostalgia as the solution to the ails of change and responsibility. At first, the video only supported that conclusion, being shot with a very grainy filter and nostalgic palette in a polaroid-esque  aspect ratio, giving it an air of wistful romanticism. In this vein (skipping the world-changing  dropping of the muppet), as Chance walks away from the piano, he sings about not forgetting “the happy thoughts,” the things that allowed the children to fly in Peter Pan and, as later lines confirm, a reference to the memories of their childhood: “the past-tense, past bedtimes / way back then when everything we read was real and everything we said rhymed” (rhyming being both a reference to the cadence of children’s stories and the fact that their outlooks synced up). Chance then encourages her to “stay in the lines,” which, although at first glance seems counter to the carefree nature of childhood, is a concluding reminder to reflect on those happier days they shared (if growing up is taking on responsibility, then what better captures how unencumbered childhood is than the remembered feeling of importance that trying to correctly fill out a coloring book once had). Essentially, the two have become strangers but still hold pieces of each other which have all but died, but some life can be injected back into those pieces by reflecting on the memories of when they fit together (reference to puzzles, not sex joke).

However, “stay in the lines” is also a command to not change. He wants to hold on to the romantic conception of her that he once had and he can’t do that knowing that they no longer connect. The video gives Wendy a voice and makes clear that she also thinks fondly of those times, but is still fundamentally different from Chance (see: the fact that she’s a muppet), which is in line with the initial message of the song: they’ll always be apart, but they’ll still always have their memories of being together. The video changes this interpretation by having Chance leave Wendy behind. Once he drops her, snow starts falling from the ceiling and the lighting changes, creating an image reminiscent of passing stars and a galaxy. Then, Chance leaves the stage with the piano and the now-hidden muppet and the color palette changes, the image becomes sharper, the aspect ratio goes from fullscreen to widescreen, and, as Chance walks out of the studio and into the street outside, we can see that everyone else is a muppet.

Chance walking through the studio.

How fucking existential.

Initially the reveal that everyone else is a muppet struck me as really fucking dumb (oh Chance is saying that he’s the only “real” one in “the game” and everyone else is just a big phony. Look at the rap world Holden Caulfield everybody, I can’t believe that I told people I like you), but when you consider the contextualizing Peter Pan metaphor, it takes on a significance that is actually worthwhile. The passing stars and changing cinematography signify a clear change of state, and I think that it’s showing Chance leaving the Neverland of his art and returning to Earth. This is reinforced by the nostalgic visual reference to the muppet show, the famed behind-the-scenes set of which (the set which childish wonder is built upon) Chance walks through and out onto some dirty LA street.

In this reading, the notion that the song posits, that Wendy has some romantic significance and that the distance between them is tragic, becomes a comforting falsehood that he’s shedding. The fact that everyone else is a muppet doesn’t signify the fact that Chance is the only real person, but that Wendy doesn’t hold any real significance and that, just like everybody else, he’s as isolated from everybody he sees as much as he is from her.

Still, even with this comedown, the final chorus soars even higher than the original, with added vocals from John Legend and others. So, while the message is changed, Chance’s concluding reminder (“Don’t forget the happy thoughts / All you need is happy thoughts”) isn’t undercut. Those memories are still of significance. The difference here is that the Chance of the video has grown up and, unlike the version of him from his memories, realizes that — while it may be romantic to imagine that there’s still something significant about Wendy — he’s not beholden to uphold the romantic conception of her that he held in those memories and that the memories will still be valuable without maintaining that conception It’s no longer tragic to know that she doesn’t hold that conception of him. People change and grow apart and sometimes that means people that were once compatible no longer are. In realizing that connections don’t have to be eternal to be real — that people aren’t continuous entities, but continuously-changing and both self and other-defined — and that he can still cherish the Wendy of his memories without connecting to Wendy as she is now, Chance changes himself. Asking Wendy to “stay in the lines” is no longer an impossible task because he’s not asking Wendy as she exists now, but as she was all those years ago.

The refrain echoes among the crescendoing, dramatic vocalizations as Chance leaves behind the idea of Wendy as a tragic stranger (and with it Neverland), maybe for good. Chance, at the song’s end, is more encumbered by responsibility towards others for having grown up, and yet, freer than ever.

The present belongs to everyone, but our past is ours to keep.

Purple sky

 

‘It’s Always Sunny’ When Max Watches TV

What happens when you get five degenerate friends that own their own dive bar in Philadelphia? You get some raucous and off-putting situations with a tumultuous storm of dark and politically incorrect (but nonetheless hilarious) behavior. Such is the premise of the TV show It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Since the show’s inception in 2005, Sunny has become a major hit for its oxymoronically pitch-black and light tone.

Throughout the years, the show has acquired a pretty large fan base and FXX has recently renewed it for its 13th and 14th seasons. The show has spawned plenty of merchandise, a traveling rendition of one of the episodes, and a consistency to the show’s plot and nature. A big fan of the show, Max Rubinstein (former Dickinson graduate and my partner in crime) allowed me to interview him about his fandom.  For him, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is more than just a source of entertainment; it serves as both a connective tissue for his social relationships and way for him to make new connections.

The show’s consistency is the bedrock of Max’s fandom. Even with its different approach to the typical sitcom, Sunny has been extremely successful and generated a large fan base. Max started watching his sophomore year of high school and quickly zipped through it on Netflix. But he didn’t stop there. He watched the show at least once a day throughout college. He says that now, “I probably watch three episodes a week, but at peak time I was watching three episodes a day, every day.” It makes sense then that he claims he can quote word for word sixty percent of the show’s lines, with some episodes as high as ninety percent. Max loves the show for its “nuanced, fucked-up humor.”

Sunny has been known for drawing attention to taboo topics like abortion, gun control, Naziism, and pedophilia, but instead of coming off as rabble-rousing or mean-spirited, it’s somehow loveable for doing so.

At times it can go further than social awareness and even provide social commentary on these controversial topics. For example, in a recent episode, “The Gang Turns Black”, the gang gets electrocuted during a storm and wakes up in black bodies. The gang then goes about their day and experiences all the different ways that African-Americans are oppressed on a daily basis. In typical Always Sunny style, the episode turns when Charlie, who is being played by a young black actor, gets shot suddenly by the police at the end of the episode. This scene directly addresses police shootings of black children like Tamir Rice and Trayvon Martin, showing that the writers of Sunny pay attention to real world events. The content of the show and attention to real world events and problems, like racism, makes this show extremely intelligent, and the fundamental reason fans like Max love its “nuanced fucked-up” nature.

Even with such dark and political humor, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia maintains a massive following because of the show’s predictable and reliable structure. This consistency allows viewers like Max to feel more deeply connected with his peers while watching the show together. He says, “…it’s just a fun thing to do with friends. It’s a good fall back, because you know everybody’s going to have a good time watching it together.” Like most sitcoms, one can jump around to any episode and be able to fully understand it. The show relies heavily on character tropes, sticky situations, and dark humor, making it easy to watch an episode without much background context.

Not only are the episodes self-contained, but its easy to find new ways to enjoy them, allowing fans to watch the same episodes time and time again. Max and his friends have made a fun drinking game to watch alongside the show. He says, “it helps to be a long time Sunny watcher, because you drink whenever a character does one of their character motifs. Or when there’s a recurring joke in the show, or when another recurring character appears.”

This type of repetition creates memories, which helps create bonds. Max says that nearly all of the friends he makes are avid Sunny watchers, and he’s usually converts the ones that aren’t. As with any show, the content may not be the sole reason why someone is a fan. These connective opportunities with others can also serve as motivation to continue watching a show, as it builds common ground. Communal watchings acts as a sort of space to hang around with friends, create memories, bond over the reliable nature and shared love of Sunny.

There are even instances when Sunny interacts with Max’s life outside of the show, showing that his fandom extends beyond a TV screen. He said, “…yeah, me and my friends were able to quote the show so much, that we could make a Sunny reference to nearly anything in conversation. So we would realize that would be pretty off putting for everyone else. So we made a game that whenever we reference Sunny in front of other people that didn’t watch the show, we would have to drink.” Even in his life outside of TV watching, Sunny began to manifest in his ways of speaking and interacting with his friends and other people. For Max, the show can as a conversational safety net; he’s always able to refer back to the show if there’s ever an awkward moment among his peers.

Max has also put in labor towards his fandom, as he has spent outside time thinking about the show and has dressed up as some of the characters. Max told me that at one point he put hours of thought into compiling an extensive list of his top thirty episodes and then shared it with his friends. This intense meticulousness and care towards the show exemplifies how much the show means to him. He has even dressed up as different characters for Halloween along with his friends. Last year he dressed as the character he most identifies with, Charlie, who shares his “…sense of wonder and adventure, [and] feels love very strongly, which is something that I feel too. And Charlie just does ridiculous things, does weird things, eats weird things, and I like doing weird things.”

However, Max was not the only one; his good friend Nick also dressed as “Fat” Mac that year (in season 7 of the show, Rob McElhenney decided to put on 30 lbs because he thought it would be funny if the character of Mac was fat all of a sudden) and the two proceeded to act out the show throughout the night. In previous years, Max has also dressed as the McPoyle brothers with his good friend Graham. The costumes generated interest among non-Sunny watchers, inviting them to join in on the show’s social sphere by piquing their interest.

Max continues to spend much of his free time interacting and engaging with elements of the show. In small groups with other fans he has even made some of the meals from the show. He says, “I’ve cooked some of the meals that they’ve brought up in the show, like milk steak (when you boil milk and drop a steak in it until it cooks). It wasn’t terrible.” This happens to be Charlie’s favorite meal, an iconic part to his mostly cat-food and gasoline diet. Max and his friends bonded over the ridiculous labor of making this specific meal together. The physical act of making it made it worthwhile despite its gross nature.

Max has even presented his Sunny fandom in situations when other may have no idea about it. To do this, he made Charlie’s beer vest from “The Gang Goes to Hell Part One”. This required creating an elaborate duct tape vest with many different holes and pockets to put beer cans in. Max wore this to a party one time, inciting vehement questioning by those partygoers who were unaware of the show. Max boasted of his knowledge of the show and was proud to explain to anyone who asked (and some who didn’t) what the beer vest meant or did, hoping to gain more viewers and more connections to the show. He fed off of the energy of being a part of something that others might not know about and felt a deep-seated connection to those that did.

There have been times when Max has been rewarded for his devotion to the show. While in Australia, Max went to a Portugal. The Man[1] concert, and had heard through the grapevine that the band was also a fan of the show. He heard reports that the band sometimes played the song, “Dayman”, created by the characters in “The Nightman Cometh”, as a warm up. He said, “As we walked in they were playing it and I thought ‘I’m in a good place’.” Max felt safe and secure once he realized he was in a space where people also shared his same interests.

There was there was even a live version of “The Nightman Cometh” that went on tour with the actual actors. Unfortunately, Max did not get a chance to see the performance, as they are no longer touring. However, the performance can be found on YouTube and Max has watched it many times. He wishes, though, that the actors would go on tour again. These specific presentations of fandom prove to Max that there exists a sense of belonging among Sunny fans, and that others want to connect to something on a deeper level as.

Sunny also was Max’s first introduction to Netflix. The site, a place to continuously binge watch TV, provides all fans of all different shows to engage in fandom. With its limitless nature, a fan can watch hours upon hours of their favorite show, building up one’s fandom little by little. This introduction to Netflix provided Max with other shows like Bob’s Burgers or Breaking Bad, inviting him to engage in other fandoms. Netflix changes the game for fans and TV watching in general, as it can be both be a place to watch your favorite shows on repeat or put on in the background of a social setting. ‘Netflix and chill,’ if you will. The introduction to Netflix brought Max’s fan potential to the surface, allowing him to experience Sunny at all hours of the day, and also served as an outlet to maybe try something new.

The show itself acts an avenue for social belonging for its fans and proves that it can be more than just a source of entertainment. The show has changed the way Max thinks about TV, but also has influenced his mannerisms and speech, how he picks and interacts with his friends, and what he does in his free time. Max’s fandom proves that fandom itself is more than just liking a TV show, artist, or movie; it can be a source for belonging, activity, and social engagement that can bring people closer together to experience both new and old things.

 

[1] This is correct punctuation for the band’s name.

 

Holly Kosiewicz

Holly Kosiewicz is Director of Policy Development at the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. She served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Jordan and El Salvador and has worked on research teams in Colombia, Peru, and the United States. Her work has been included and published in several book projects as well as The Journal of Higher Education, The Journal of Economic Psychology, and Education Week. Holly earned her Master’s at Brandeis University (2007) and completed her PhD at the University of Southern California (2015).  

HARRIS: What were your immediate plans after finishing undergrad and did they work out the way you imagined they would?

HOLLY: I graduated from UT Austin in 2002, and my intent was to do international development work. I’m a first-generation American, and my Polish parents instilled in me the importance of understanding different cultures. So, after UT, I joined the Peace Corps and worked in Jordan. Unfortunately, we were evacuated after six months of service. That sent me back to the States for about half a year. After that I returned to the Peace Corps in El Salvador but I realized it wasn’t really a good fit; nevertheless I still wanted to do something related to international development work. So, afterwards, I decided to get a Master’s in International Development from Brandeis University. As a student there, I became a research assistant on a project that was examining the well-being of a Bolivian indigenous group: the Tsimane’. That experience is what sparked my interest in doing research.

After I graduated with my Master’s degree, I got a job working as a research assistant at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia. There, I worked on a number of projects, but the project that most interested me was one that investigated the impacts of a financial aid program intended to help lower-income students attend and succeed in college. What I liked about that project was that I was able to work with economists and psychologists who were studying the behavioral dimensions of student aid. I worked at Los Andes for a year before returning to the States to start paying off my student loans. When I returned, I began my work in DC as a researcher for an education newspaper called Education Week. If you’re interested in education, or K-12, I would recommend looking into it and reading its articles.

After working there for two years, I enrolled in the education policy Ph.D. program at the University of Southern California. USC gave me the best opportunity to do my own research and gave me the best financial support. While there, I studied developmental education in community colleges. To give you some context, developmental education is largely used by community colleges to help underprepared students succeed at the college level. Some people call it “remedial coursework.” And there’s been a lot of debate about the effectiveness of developmental education. I did a wide range of research—I do mixed methods research, which means it involves both quantitative and qualitative approaches—trying to test the effectiveness of different assessment instruments to determine which ones can adequately assess if a student is prepared for college or not.

In my last year of school, I was laboring on whether I should go to academia or whether I should enter the government. It was a hard decision. Deep down, I really wanted to conduct research that could make a meaningful impact on the education that students receive, and I wanted to work directly with state and local policy makers.

So instead of taking a job in academia, I decided to take a job as Director of Policy Development at the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. Because the work I’m doing has a clear impact on state higher education policy, I think it is the right place to be, at least for now. But only time will tell if I transition to a research organization or try being an academic later.

HARRIS: You’re back in Texas, right? Did a longing to be home bring you back?

HOLLY: Yeah, for sure. I wanted to be closer to my parents, especially as they get older. My husband and I have a family here and want to make sure our kids have a close relationship with our relatives.

HARRIS: Can you describe for me what you do during a typical day at work?

HOLLY: Well, my work really ebbs and flows. I don’t really have a typical day, but I can tell you what I do. My official title is Director of Policy Development at the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, and I work in a relatively new division at the agency called Innovation and Policy Development. And the short of it is: we’re considered a think tank within the state agency, that supports and conducts research that has the potential to inform higher education policy and practice in the state. For the past year, I have been developing relationships with external researchers—these might be researchers in academic institutions, like Dickinson, or in think tanks—to work on studies that answer the big questions that state policy makers have around higher education.

For example, one of the things I’m currently working on is dual-credit education. Dual-credit education is a process by which a high school student can simultaneously earn high school and college credit from a single course. In Texas, participation in dual-credit education has been expanding rapidly for the last 15 years. But recently, due to new legislation, it’s also seen a significant increase in the percent of 14- and 15-year-olds participating in it. As a result of these shifts, state and local policymakers are raising questions about whether dual-credit education is being effectively scaled. Are students academically prepared to succeed in dual-credit courses, which are college-level courses? Are the academic standards used to teach dual-credit courses the same as those used to teach regular college courses? What are the costs of delivering dual-credit education? And very broadly, how are high school students benefitting from dual-credit education? These are some questions that the Coordinating Board, in collaboration with the RAND Corporation, is trying to answer, and we hope that these answers can help state legislators and policymakers decide what kinds of reform should take place.

HARRIS: What do you think are some of the biggest challenges to developing and implementing policies in higher education?

HOLLY: I think one big challenge is how to go about improving education policy and practice when working with very limited resources. In other words, where can you introduce reforms that generate the largest gains for the least amount of money? That question is always at the forefront of policymaking at all levels of government.

Another challenge is the political pressure that policymakers encounter continuously to get things done. Many times, the pressure to get things done quickly runs counter to the long time it takes research to inform what policy should look like. Research is typically very methodical and it’s slow to produce results. Policymakers, however, need to make decisions quickly, and so they are not going to wait for research that takes five years to complete. The challenge is thus designing research that can produce results relatively quickly while meaningfully informing the decisions that policymakers need to make.

Another challenge is that there are a lot of stakeholders involved, and each of them has its own interests and concerns. It’s sometimes difficult to understand what all of these interests and concerns are, not to mention determining how to balance them in such a way that everyone benefits. Not only students, for instance, but also teachers and faculty, advisors and administrators.

HARRIS: You’ve worked in different educational systems and in several capacities related to education: development projects, policy research abroad. How have these experiences informed the work you do now?

HOLLY: Well, I’ve always believed that education can make society more equal. And that belief has shaped the work that I have done since I’ve graduated from college. I’ve always wanted to ensure that my work could really improve education quality, particularly for the underserved. If I wasn’t doing that—if my work was helping maintain the status quo, for instance—that would make me feel very uncomfortable.

HARRIS: Some people might cast or imagine policy research as being a separate project from what could be called “on the ground” work, or work that interacts directly with the people affected by policy.

HOLLY: I don’t think policy research has to be detached at all from the people you are trying to affect. There are all different types of research. There is research that uses administrative records from state government agencies or federal government agencies. But there is also policy work or policy research where the researcher engages directly with students, with teachers, with community organizers to really get a better grasp of what is happening in the trenches and to give voice to those who have been silenced by more dominant groups. I think the experiences of people who deliver education or experience education is extremely valuable, especially when you’re trying to contextualize, for example, quantitative findings. And the only real way you can get at that is by actually talking to the people who are directly involved in overseeing and delivering education.

HARRIS: What advice do you have for someone trying to determine the best way to have an impact on the educational systems that surround them?

HOLLY: I took some time off after earning an undergraduate degree—I didn’t go straight into my PhD because I think it is really important to figure out where your passion lies. And I think one way of doing that is working in the trenches and really trying to figure out what are the challenges that students are facing and what are the challenges that teachers are facing. I think those experiences can really help you figure out what you are interested in and what you like to do. For example, I was a teacher in the Peace Corps and I discovered that I wasn’t particularly good at it. But that experience also helped me to better understand that there are so many external factors, like nutrition and outside demands, that can impact if a child learns and performs well. I saw that with my own eyes, and I don’t think I would have learned about that sitting behind a computer screen or reading a report, you know? Or at least, I wouldn’t have learned it so profoundly.

So I would recommend to anyone who is interested in making an impact on education policy to work side-by-side with educators, parents, students and educational organizations. Get to really know the challenges that they are facing before trying to make change. Once you get a good grasp of what those challenges are, the way you approach education policy research will be more thoughtful, and probably will gain more respect.

Valve Loves Mods

Have you ever played a game and thought to yourself “I really wish that dragon looked like Thomas the Train?” Well if you have, then you are in luck, because mods allow you to do just that. And if you have never even come close to thinking that, then fear not: there is still a mod out there for you. Mods are a great way to make a game more personal and entertaining since mods can essentially change almost any aspect of a video game into something the player wants. However, mods would be nothing without the developers that make the games they are for.

One developer that has been particularly prominent in the modding world is Valve. In fact, Valve was actually born from mods. In 1996, two Microsoft employees—Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington—left Bill Gates’ company to go and try designing video games.  To do this, they acquired the software development kit (or SDK) for the Quake engine and began modding. In 1998, they released their debut product Half Life.  Essentially just a large mod to the Quake engine, Half Life was an instant hit and later was actually used by other people to create one of the most successful mods in history, Counter Strike. The Counter Strike mod was eventually bought back by Valve and is now one of their most successful games, generating huge profits for Valve.

It’s obvious that a prominent part of Valve’s foundation is modding but there is one thing that sets them apart from other companies with the same selling point, such as Bethesda Softworks: Valve actively encourages the modding community. This encouragement has brought tons of benefits to the company, but this is not just a one sided relationship. As the rest of this post will explain, Valve’s encouragment for modding benefits modders by offering  simple ways to create mods through things like creation kits, quick and easy ways to access and share mods through the Steam Workshop, and by providing players with a wide variety of mods. At the same time, modders provide value to Valve by providing the company with “free labor” and increasing the value of its games through modders’ creation of “complements.”

Video of mod that turns dragons into trains in Skyrim, By Gampo

In order to fully understand Valve’s approach to the modding community, one first has to know what a mod is. The issue with defining mods, however, is that there are so many different forms they can take. Mods can be anything from an enhancement to a game’s graphics to the creation of an almost entirely new game via the original game’s code, as in the case of Half Life. This is why the best definition of what a mod  is needs to be rather broad. Walt Scacchi, a senior research scientist at the Institute for Software Research, gives a great and widely accepted description of what a mod is in his article “Computer Game Mods, Modders, Modding, and the Mod Scene” where he states that a mod is basically just “a legal change in pre-existing code that creates something new.” Now that a definition is in place, we can explian how mods benefit Valve’s community and Valve themselves can be explained, starting with community benefits.

Valve’s encouragement for modding has benefitted the community by allowing players to easily create mods through programs like creation kits and SDKs. One way Valve has encouraged modding has been through the release of SDKs for certain games. SDKs are essentially development tools that allow its user to create applications within a game. A second way Valve has encouraged modding is through the release of creation kits for certain games. A creation kit can be downloaded upon purchase of a game that has one associated with it. Upon downloading the creation kit the user can then edit almost anything they want in the game. The biggest benefit of using the creation kit to mod is that the mods a user creates are not stored in the game’s files. They are instead stored separately, so that if a user edits something in a game that makes it run incorrectly or messes up a certain part of the game’s engine, the entire game is not destroyed. These programs Valve has created greatly benefit their community by making it is easier than ever to create mods. Take the example of Skyrim. Once someone has downloaded the Skyrim creation kit from Steam anyone can take game models such as walls, characters, items, or even buildings and build entirely new creations quickly and easily with them.  Since Valve provides people with the necessary software to mod right off the bat, members of the community that want to mod do not have to spend hours figuring out how and download outside software; instead, they can just boot up Valve’s programs and have the ability to create any mod easily right then and there.

Making modding easier is not the only benefit these programs have had for the community, they have also made it possible for almost anyone to mod. Things like creation kits  have made modding rather simple and intuitive; one no longer has to be a wiz with computers to create a mod. Instead the would-be modder can just boot up his or her creation kit and be ready to create. Creation kits also mean that new or rather unskilled modders no longer have to worry about destroying the game they are playing since everything they add or create will be stored separately. Valve’s encouragement for mods has made modding simpler and easier than ever, which is a huge benefit to people who play their games and want to mod. But creating mods is not the only thing Valve has made easier; they have also made sharing and accessing mods easier than ever.

Valve’s encouragement for modding has benefitted the community by providing them with easy ways to share and access mods through the Steam Workshop. In 2008 Valve released the Steam Workshop for their game client Steam with the intentions of creating a way for people to easily share and access mods they create themselves or want to use, and it did just that. The Steam Workshop was an instant success and people immediately began sharing their creations. Players no longer had to scour the internet looking for one specific mod they wanted; instead, they could just log on to the Workshop and search for it using the search tool. In fact, the Market not only made finding particular mods easier, it made discovering new mods easier too. The Workshop provided players with ways of browsing the top and newest mods for their favorite games quickly. Once a player found a mod they wanted, he or she could click the subscribe button for that mod and whenever the modder came out with an updated version of the mod it would update automatically.

Image from Counter Strike: Source, By Tamahikari Tammas

Image from Counter Strike: Source, By Tamahikari Tammas

The Steam Community Workshop not only made accessing mods easier, it made sharing them easier too. The Workshop provided an easy way for modders to share their creations since they could just post them for others to find them. All of their creations were also easy for the creators to access within the Workshop so they could update them at any time. The Workshop also provided modders and non-modders with a simple way to share their favorite mods. People could “like” mods and send the links to them to their friends, making it easier than ever to share their favorites.

The final benefit Valve’s encouragement for mods has provided the company’s community is that it has created an expansive variety of mods offering a personalized experience for almost any player. With the implementation of the Steam Community Workshop, creation kits, and software development kits,  it has become easier than ever to create, access, and share mods. This simplicity has lead to a seemingly endless supply of mods meaning there is a mod for almost anyone in any game. This allows players to make the gaming experience their own and tailor it to the way they like it, which is what mods are really meant to do. But the programs Valve has implemented have created such a vast quantity of mods that personalization has been taken a step further. Now players can basically make entire games into what they want them to look like or what they thought the game should look like.

It is great that Valve has encouraged modding and thus brought so many benefits to their community  but they probably would not have been as encouraging if mods did not benefit them in some way. Valve’s encouragement for mods has benefitted them because modders act as a kind of free labor. As stated before, the definition of mod can be rather broad; therefore, a mod is not necessarily just an addition to a pre-existing game. Modders quite frequently actually create mods that fix bugs in a game or enhance certain other aspects of the game, such as graphics. These fixes or enchantments cost nothing to Valve and greatly improve the gaming experience.  Thus, modders act as a type of legal free labor for Valve. In fact, according to Hector Postigo, an associate professor at Temple University, modders actually save game developers upwards of $2.5 million dollars a year in labor costs. Since Valve has encouraged mods through things like the Workshop and SDKs, the number of modders creating these fixes is constantly growing. This means that Valve’s savings from free labor can only increase.

Modders do not only benefit Valve by being free labor, however; they also act as “complementors” to Valve’s games. As explained earlier, Valve’s encouragement for modding has made it easier for almost anyone to mod, thereby increasing the number of modders out there. This benefits Valve because each of these modders offers their own “complements” to a game. How these contributions work to increase the value of a game is explained by Lars Bo Jeppesen, a professor at Copenhagen Business School, in his essay entitled “Profiting From Innovative User Communities: How Firms organize the Production of User Modifications in the Computer Games Industry.” He describes modders as being “complementors” who add complements (mods) to a game that a developer has created. They are complements because they add features that enhance the game. Modders/complementors can only add complements to a game though because the mods or complements they create are not crucial to playing or experiencing the game. When enough complements have been added to a game, the game will increase in value, and this will in turn most likely lead to an increase in sales. However, this does not mean that when a game acquires a lot of complements Valve will increase the price of the game. This  is a huge benefit for Valve since more game sales means more profit. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

Gabe Newell, Co-Founder of Valve

Gabe Newell, Co-Founder of Valve

A great example of this is the Fallout series, specifically the games before Fallout 4. Though Fallout is not a Valve-developed game, Bethesda Softworks, the game’s developers of Fallout,  use Steam to sell and offer mods for their games. The Fallout series is available on all platforms including PlayStation, Xbox, and Steam (Valve’s game platform), but it consistently sells better on Steam than any platform. Why could this be? This is because Valve is the only one that offered mods or “complements” for these games prior to the release of Fallout 4. Because Valve offered the ability to create and download mods to their Fallout games, people would add “complements” to the game, increasing the game’s value on Steam. Thus the sales for Fallout on Steam were greater than the sales on other platforms. The value of games on Steam have thus greatly increased due to Valve’s encouragement for mods.

Many competitors such as Sony and Microsoft have rivaled Valve in game development but Valve has always dominated the modding scene. They figured out what works and know how to use it to create a simple, enjoyable experience for those who want to mod and profit off of the mods these people create. The key to doing this was releasing products that encourage modding such as SDKs, creation kits, and the community market. These encouragements benefitted modders and game players by offering simple ways to create, access, and share mods while benefitting Valve by giving them a source of free labor and increasing the value of their games. A Half Life 3 mod (or full game) would most likely benefit Valve and their community a great deal too.

Why Bee Movie is Government Propaganda

I saw Bee Movie when it came out in theaters (whenever that was) and liked it fine (I was 10 or something–again, I don’t know when the film came out–but the point is that my critical senses weren’t as finely honed back then). I didn’t really get who Jerry Seinfeld was since I hadn’t seen Seinfeld, but he had a funny voice and that was cool (again, I was 10. Maybe 11).

However, this evening my brother mentioned that Bee Movie popped up in Netflix and that despite the provided two-and-a-half-out-of-five-star rating, he watched it and thought it was a fine piece of cinema. In an effort to join him in waxing poetic over Jerry Seinfeld‘s animation debut (?), I thought back on the plot of the incredibly forgettable film.

I found that all I could remember was the kitschy opening scene wherein the main character (a bee played by none other than Jerry Seinfeld, the only actor I’ve mentioned thus far in the article) goes over to his closet, which is full of a bunch of iterations of the same outfit, then ponders which of the outfits he will pick (comedy gold! Or comedy honey, I should say (ref:)).

I found that after focusing on the film for far longer than I should, I could also remember that he (the bee person/Jerry Seinfeld) leaves his hive (for surely contrived reasons that I’ve since forgotten) and then meets a human, falls in love with the human, somehow manages to communicate with the human, then discovers that humans take all the bees’ honey. Upon realizing that the entire life work of every bee he knows amounts to producing food for people, he goes to court and gets the humans to stop taking the bees’ honey. Now that the bees don’t have to give most their honey away, they get lazy. Then they (the bees) band together and save a plane from crashing (I forget how that improbable transition happens) and decide to allow their honey to be taken away from them again (or something like that.).

Going through the plot in broad strokes like this a thought occurred to me: it sounds like a really contrived argument for the benefits of taxation. Is it possible that Jerry Seinfeld worked with the American government to subconsciously remind people that if they don’t work for something larger than themselves (in this case, allowing their money to be put into the government) they will become unmotivated and lazy? I don’t know, he played a really dickish, shmuckish version of himself in that one episode of Louie (or is it Louis? I swear whichever one I try first is always wrong. It’s like I live in a synthetic universe in which some malevolent being is watching over my life and in this being’s grand attempt to fuck with me the only thing it changes is the correct spelling of the name of Louis C.K.’s television show). Answer: It is possible and, actually, would be fertile ground for further exploration in the form of an article.

I said so right then and there: “I’m going to write an article about why Bee Movie is government propaganda.” My brother laughed. “No”, I said, “I’m serious. I’m going to write something about that tonight.” “That’s stupid,” my brother replied supportively. Now here we are. I can’t outline my argument at this point because I’ve yet to google Bee Movie, as I’ve been too lazy to do so, but I now intend to gather sufficient information on the vile piece of cinema propaganda to expose Jerry Seinfeld for the crooked shill he is. I aim to show that he’s allowed the content of his films to be dictated by the government and is willing to subject the American people to being told what to think (despicable)–a surely libelous claim without proper support.

So I googled Bee Movie and the main bee’s name is Barry B. Benson (Jesus christ). In doing my investigation, I also discovered that the film was released in November of 2007, putting me at 11 years of age when I watched it for the first and only time. To be honest, looking into the film and investing energy into realizing this idea has made me not want to actually write this essay, but I’ve committed myself to it and so have to make at least some attempt at an argument.

The first hint that more cynical machinations are afoot than readily perceptible on the film’s glossy, Jerry Seinfeld-brand-honey-coated surface can be found in the film’s blatant attempt to appeal to specific demographics. The plot, in which a recent college-graduate bee be(e)comes disinterested with the monotonous life of a worker bee and leaves the hive, only to discover that bees are being exploited by humans and then goes on to sue humanity en masse, would probably not be able to suspend the disbelief of any reasonable non-child.

However, the film seems to be trying to appeal to teenagers and young adults who should be able to relate (?) to the concerns of the bee trying to come to terms with the fact that he is literally only going to be a worker bee his whole life. The cast also includes several actors who appeared on Seinfeld–including Jerry himself, Michael Richards, (either known to you as Kramer or the man who went off on a sudden racist shouting fit in an attempt to “shut down” a heckler), and everybody’s favorite doorman, Larry Miller (he played a doorman in one episode of Seinfeld)–in an attempt to please the parents of the small children who comprised the film’s target audience.

I went into this paragraph thinking I would say something about how the movie is trying to reach everyone so as to convince them they should be grateful to just be “worker bees,” (I’m pretty sure that’s the note the film ends on; I haven’t finished the wikipedia page yet), but now that I think about it, that just seems like industry-standard marketing–trying to appeal to the largest audience possible and the like. Really, if they wanted to brainwash people they would have been best off trying to embed a message that only the children would pick up on, as their brains are the most malleable.

And that’s exactly what the film did. They attacked the brains of the children but marketed to a large audience so as to avoid suspicion (that doesn’t seem like that should be the correct spelling of that word).

Actually–no. I give up. I thought of that segue and I was going to try and think of some way to make it work, but I just don’t care any more. My point stands, the movie’s apparent (again, I haven’t finished the wikipedia page) theme of ‘living for a collective instead of just yourself’ is sort of suspect. Actually, it’s not all that bad when you phrase it like that. I’m trying to think of ways to make the whole “be subservient to the government” comparison again, but it’s sort of hard to do without really knowing how the movie plays out. Oh well.

I don’t really know how I feel about Bee Movie. 11-year-old me thought it was pretty tight, 20-year-old me thought that the plot as I remembered it seemed to have some Orwellian overtones. In conclusion, my brother recommends Bee Movie starring Jerry Seinfeld (who may or may not be a dick; he was one on Louie and he seems like he’s capable of being a dick in real life). He says the plot “doesn’t make any sense” but it’s fantastic for that fact and it’s available on Netflix so hey, why not?


Addendum:

It has come to my attention that Bee Movie is not, in fact, on Netflix.

I can think of three reasons why my brother said that it was:

A: The movie was on Netflix but has since been removed (probably because Netflix decided they didn’t, in fact, want their site to be a platform for communist propaganda).

B: My brother is unaccountably stupid and nothing he says should be believed.

C: My brother had a Jerry Seinfeld-centric fever dream (ex), in which he watched and was greatly entertained by Bee Movie, the film itself being pieced together from the broken remnants that lingered in his mind from when he viewed it as a small child.

A seems unlikely, so that leaves us with B and C. I’m not sure which is, but they’re both very fun to imagine (it’s probably B, though).

Image 1

Image 1 of 11

In early July I had the pleasure of visiting the studio of artist Nicholas Kahn. Though he has his primary studio in Hudson, Nicholas also works in his farmhouse where he has cultivated a menagerie of objects from Mexican devil figures to dead bats and taxidermies. As I am studying photography, it was a rare opportunity to see his artistic process, although for the majority of my visit Nicholas was working on a watercolor painting, another one of his mediums. Some of his other works are heavily inspired by 17th century dutch art and pagan religions ( especially the Greenman), which are prevalent in his floor to ceiling tapestries. After finishing up with his painting, which ended up being a pangolin suspended over valley and Hudson River, we headed out to a local waterfall to work on “Dreams of the Drowning World,” a portrait series by Nicholas and fellow artist Richard Selesnick. I must say that being dressed up like a disheveled circus performer (some of Nicholas’ other inspirations are avant garde ballet and circus/Mardi Gras parades) and partially submerged in a creek was not part of my plan, but it yielded some amazing portraits, and it gave me some insight into his photographic process.

Nicholas and Richard’s works can be seen by visiting kahnselesnick.biz.

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