Underlying the sellers’ complaints is a kind of dismay, the feeling that what had previously been a safe haven for nerds to buy and sell $2 records is being threatened — that one more corner of the internet that wasn’t yet a glossy behemoth designed to subsume and capitalize on your personal information was about to collapse.
If you’re serious about music, especially buying vinyl, Discogs is essential. It has the largest catalogue of actually existing records in the world, created over several decades by the users itself. It’s arguably the place to buy obscure records, often cheaper than on Ebay or Amazon. But with it starting to up its fees and other moves, it may be preparing for an IPO or being sold. Even if this does not happen, it’s already in the process of enshittifying its platform, making it worse for users and sellers both.
For me, I mainly use it to get information on music and albums and it’s always my first stop for that sort of information, so it’ll be vexing to see it gone.
If you wanted to know about NFTs, where they came from, what they’re being used for and especially why they are harmful but were afraid to ask, this is the video for you.
At almost two and a half hours it’s a long sit, but that’s because Dan Olson takes the time to set the context in which NFTs arouse. To understand NFTs you have to understand Bitcoin and all the other electronic currencies that were inspired by it, not to mention the dreaded blockchain and the whole spectre of ‘web3’ technology. As important, Olson understand that just knowing the technological context isn’t enough and therefore starts with the real driving force behind Bitcoin and NFTs: the 2008 recession.
Because in 2008 the world economy crashed and while it may superfically look like the world has recovered since, the truth is it wrecked the opportunities of an entire generation. The idea that if you get the right education, go on to get a good job you can have a good, stable career the way your parents could in the sixties had been undermined for decades of course, but the 2008 recession made it official. The ladder had been pulled up and the normal ways of bettering yourself are no longer available. Even people lucky enough to graduate and start a middle class career are finding life precarious; you may be temporarily affluent but are you secure the way your parents were secure in their careers? And it’s not just careers that are insecure: something as basic as owning your own house is increasingly out of reach of all but the most upper of middle class people. Be it London, new York or Amsterdam, it’s hard to find a house when investors routinely overbid you. The average housing price here in Amsterdam is now 10,000 euros/square metre, which means my own appartment of 48 square metres is worth half a million euros. It’s absurd.
All of which means is that life is as unstable as it has ever been since the 1930ties for the vast majority of people even in rich countries, the gap between the rich and the rest of us as great as it ever has been while ever attempt to level this gap has been smashed. We’ve seen how the establishment in the UK reacted when Jeremy Corbyn almost won the 2017 elections, which led to the Labour right smashing their own party while the entire press conspired to put Johnson in Number 10. When regular politics are no longer allowed and regular ways to have a stable career and life are equally smashed, that leads to people looking for alternatives. In politics, this lead to Trump and Brexit. Similarly, if people cannot get rich conventionally, they’ll seek out other ways of doing so. There’s a huge market of precarious, affluent middle class people ripe for exploitation.
Which brings me to Albania. A former ‘protectorate’ of fascist Italy, after liberation at the end of the Second World War it became a communist dictatorship ruled by Enver Hoxha. Hoxha was a Stalinist so orthodox that he broke with the Warsaw Pact for being too soft. Under his leadership Albania was so closed a country it made North Korea seem positively welcoming. The collapse of communism all over Eastern Europe also reached Albania and in the early nineties it became a normal democratic, capitalist state. Now if you know your recent European history, you know that all these countries that had lived under communism for almost half a century were incredibly vulnerable to capitalist exploitation and were plundered on an unprecedented scale by their own ex-communist elites and western advicers. Albania was worse than most and its economy became dominated by pyramid and ponzi schemes, with millions of people investing their savings in them. When it all collapsed in 1997 it led to civil war.
As Dan Olson argues here, all electronic currencies are pyramid schemes, people buying them to sell to a bigger fool and NFTs even more so. There’s a ready made market for them, of those precarious middle class, usually tech adjecent people who want to find a way to get rich or die trying. Which is worrying. It’s not just the godawful realities of bitcoin and NFTs, it’s that once it all burst, once all these people, already primed by Trump and Qanon, lose their shit, they’ll lose their shit and what will that mean for America?
De haat, dat is wat hem meteen raakt. ‘Ik schrok daarvan.’ De intense haat, tegen asielzoekers, Marokkaanse Nederlanders, zwarte mensen. Erik: ‘En alles in Nederland is kanker. Kankerjongen, kankerneger, kankerhoer.’ In Vlaanderen krijgen de ‘makakken’ de schuld, in Nederland de ‘Marokkanen’. Elk gebied heeft zo zijn eigen ‘overlast’: gewelddadige foto’s en video’s van bendes in Latijns-Amerika, porno en geweld tegen vrouwen in het Midden-Oosten. De Portugese en Griekse moderatoren hebben het relatief rustig. Zij kunnen nog weleens Netflix aanzetten. Nederlanders niet: Nederland is het land van de haat, zegt Erik.
First, it turns out the Netherlands is about the most racist, hateful European country on Facebook, with the most complaints per day, lots of it racially motivated. Most of this occurs below the radar, but we saw the tip of the iceberg last year, when Dutch politician and media personality Sylvana Simons who had become the target of racial hatred on Facebook, reported this to the public prosecutor and examples of this hatred were given in the resulting lawsuits. To hear that this is indeed a common occurrence for Dutch people of colour on Facebook is disappointing, but not unsurprising. There is a huge amount of resentment hiding behind the white Dutch liberal pretence.
But second, there’s also the way Facebook treats its moderators, who turn out to have no support whatsoever except from a dodgy “feelgoodmanager”. Barely trained people working for little more than minimum wage are supposed to review material that goes beyond “just” racist comments, but includes snuff videos, child porn and other traumatic material even experts are supposed to only see in moderation, not eight hours a day, five days a week. No wonder so many moderators either quit or self medicate with alcohol or drugs.
But of course moderation is only a cost to Facebook and their real interest is to get as many people as possible posting and who cares what they’re posting. As long as ad revenue keeps coming, Facebook don’t give a fuck.
SO: To date, including the money I was paid to produce the artwork, I have made $1,761.50 from this image. Not bad! Notably: $814 of that came after Boing Boing decided to feature the art with a proper link pointing people to my shop. There are a bunch of factors to consider here.
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But I also think it’s important to share these numbers as a reminder that just because you’ve seen someone’s work shared on a popular platform (or by a popular person), doesn’t mean they’re automatically set for life. It does, however, mean they might be making a couple hundred bucks more than they usually do in a given month, and when you’re trying to make it as a freelancer that makes all the difference in the world.
I’ve shared one of her sailing cartoons before, on Metafilter, but I’m not sure I’d buy a print myself, if only because it’s usually such a hassle to get that sort of stuff shipped from the US. Bellwood’s essay is a good reminder of the financial realities of “going viral” and what that means for an artist or cartoonist and why proper attribution is so important. Something I’m not always practising myself, I’ve realised. Not often we get such a honest, open look into what large scale exposure means for an independent artist like Bellwood.
And, if a lot of people make a lot of money and there are a lot of accolades being thrown about, then a lot of credit is going to go to a lot of people, from whoever cut those winning trailers to the designers and animators who got Rocket’s fur to look just so to Gunn himself. If comic book people get any credit, chances are it’s going to be as a collective (i.e. “Marvel”) or under a “Special Thanks” near the end of the end-credit scrawl (IMDb has comics writers Dan Abnett and Andy Lannning receiving writing credit; if that’s on the screen near the “written by” credit, then that’s awesome).
I especially like his idea of making a donation to The Hero Initiative equal to the cost of the movie ticket, to help that charity help out comics creators screwed over by the comics companies. Of course it would be better if the comics industry as a whole, and especially the Big Two, should treat their employees better and let the people who actually created the characters that are now making millions in movies for them have a little bit of the slice as well. Still, it was nice that Marvel arranged for a private screening of the movie for Bill Mantlo.
Remember Bill Mantlo? Marvel’s most prolific writer in the eighties, about the only one who could make something as uninspiring a toy as ROM into an actually readable, perhaps even good comic. When Shooter was ousted, Mantlo got less and less work, dropped out of comics to try and become a lawyer, then had a car accident that left him paralysed and penniless. Thanks to the Guardians movie, no less a newspaper than the New York Times wrote about Mantlo:
Like millions of moviegoers over the weekend, Bill Mantlo watched “Guardians of the Galaxy,” the Marvel Studios space adventure that sold more than $172 million in tickets worldwide in its first four days of release.
The film’s success is particularly meaningful to Mr. Mantlo, 62, a comic-book writer who helped create one of the movie’s main characters: the foul-tempered, gun-wielding anthropomorphic Rocket Raccoon.
Mr. Mantlo did not see “Guardians of the Galaxy” in a theater, but in his bed at the nursing home where he is being cared for after a 1992 accident in which he was hit by a car and left with brain damage.
Michael Mantlo, his brother, said Bill owed his health partly to Medicaid and partly to the grass-roots efforts of comics fans, who not only made donations on his behalf but also brought attention to his involvement in creating a character whose value to Marvel had suddenly mushroomed.
As Michael explained in a telephone interview, the focus on his brother has encouraged the studio to reconsider its obligations to him. “The more often Bill’s name gets mentioned, and the more often he is given public credit for something that he did, the easier it is for me to go to Marvel and say, ‘You might want to consider raising your offer.’ ”
It was only the negative publicity around the first Superman movie that finally got Siegel and Shuster a small part of the millions DC/Warner had made of their characters, it’s good to see Michael Mantlo taking advantage of that for his brother here. Bill Mantlo deserves it.