Why anonymity and pseudonyms on the internet are so important

Anonymity and the use of pseudonyms on the internet has a bad reputation. It is seen merely as a cover for various forms of harassment. There have even been suggestions to entirely do away with it. Journalist Walter Isaacson is one person who argues for this. But this is a dangerous idea. Anonymity on the internet sometimes provides cover for harassment, but it also prevents it.

For this is a world full of cruelty and bigotry. Innocent people are regularly harassed, beaten or even killed for who they are or what they believe. The perpetrators have little need of hiding their identity and often commit acts of violence in broad daylight. They don't even hide their names online, as anyone who has used Facebook can attest to. But because of that violence and abuse, the victims often need to hide.

For them, the internet and the anonymity it provides is often the only way for them to talk to others about their experiences and thoughts without serious repercussions. It is not safe to be openly LGBT. Political dissidents in dictatorships can be punished for criticizing the government. Mental illness is still highly stigmatized and talking about having one is seen as shameful. Welfare bureaucracies often use posts on social media to deny disabled people their benefits  Workers have been fired by their employers or are never hired because of their social media posts. They are many, and who they are vary widely, but they all have a legitimate need for anonymity.

For them, an anonymous or pseudonymous social media presence is not cowardice, but a rational and prudent precaution. It frees them to talk openly about things that would be seriously punished in physical spaces. What they talk about can range from cathartic conversations about mental illness to serious political criticism of government and society to the joyous expression of their LGBT identities.

The suggestion that hiding one's legal name is necessarily an act of cowardly dishonesty is itself dishonest. On the contrary, doing so often enables honest self-expression. The name you give yourself online may even reveal more about yourself than your legal name.  For many trans people, the idea it would be more honest to use their "real" (i.e legal) name is a cruel joke.

To sneer at this reveals a privileged and ignorant mindset. It is the mindset of the rich, those who can say what they want without consequences. It is a viewpoint of wealthy bestseller authors like Isaacson mentioned above, "entrepreneurs" and columnists for major newspapers. The contempt they hold is ultimately that of the wealthy against the poor and disadvantaged.

It reeks of the "just-world fallacy". The people who hold it seems to believe that anyone who has something to hide out of fear of the consequences is necessarily hiding something bad. But that is not the case. Often people hide innocent things out of fear for being abused for it. And to deprive them of online anonymity is a cruel way to deny what is often their only way of express themselves.

Streaming media services are a racket

That title is a strong statement, but I stand by it. Streaming services are a corporate racket that steals from you as a consumer and diminishes our culture. It may be convenient for now, but it has unfortunate long term side-effects. I myself use streaming services myself for music, but it is bad for both the individual consumer and cultural preservation, in ways that physical media of old wasn't.

When you buy a physical copy of something, it is yours to keep. It is of course possible for the work, whether in the form of a book, DVD or record, to go out of print. In fact, this happens all the time. Most books that were ever written are now out of print.

But in that case, the work still survives in the form of existing physical copies or through piracy. The copy you bought is still available for you as long as you can personally preserve it. Your copy might break. but you are legally allowed to make copies for your own personal use. Spreading those copies can be illegal, but you shouldn't really care about that. Piracy of Out-of-print or otherwise commercially unavailable works is absolutely no crime from a moral perspective. It might be illegal, but it is often the only way to make such works available to a new audience.

With streaming, you don't get that. The consumer continually pays for access to a collection of works over the internet. And it is the corporate owners who decides what is included in that collection. They can take away anything of what you paid for, and there is nothing you can do about that. You pay and you pay the corporations and in the end you own nothing. Streaming media is inherently impermanent.

It is especially bad with streaming film and TV. Film and TV shows disappear all the time from streaming services, often because of expired license agreements that were not renewed. And if a work is removed from a media streaming service, it will ordinarily not leave a copy behind.

This is terrible for the individual consumer, who will lose access to the work despite making regular payments for it. And it is frightening from a cultural preservation and accessibility perspective. Films and music are art and as such should be preserved. Artistic works of the past provide invaluable insight on our past and are capable of inspiring us today. Streaming will hamper our future ability to preserve and access artistic works.

If you want another but similar perspective on this problem, I recommend the video essayist Kyle Kallgren. He speaks far more eloquently that I about the preservation aspect and the general problems with streaming media services in his vlog on the demise of the film service Filmstruck. 

DVDs are still made, but they're a dying medium. It is increasingly common for some works such as TV-shows to only be available via streaming. When they get removed from those services, they will leave no physical copies and perhaps only exists as memory or in some corporate vault.

Sure, some of the losses of works that for example Netflix have suffered from is due to the media conglomerates wanting to put their works on their own streaming platform. Disney has done just that and created Disney Plus. Other corporations are doing the same. But that is also bad from an accessibility standpoint.

Cinema and DVD stores show and sell movies from a variety of producers. The consumer can pick and choose the movies they were interested in and don't need to care which studio made them. You buy individual movies in such a market. You can't do that with streaming.

In the streaming future that will soon be a reality, you'll need to buy access to an entire streaming service in order to see any single film offered. No picking and choosing from multiple studios, unless you're prepared to pay multiple subscriptions. This will have the sinister effect of encouraging consumer loyalty to the corporations whose services they use. Not that some kind of streaming monopoly would be any better. Private monopolies are terrible for the consumer for reasons I don't even need to explain.

And there is still many examples of works being removed from the market and put in a corporate vault. That word "vault" might sound safe. At least the work is preserved for a future return to the market, right? But those vaults are not safe at all. The hard truth is that corporations don't care about preservation of the works they own the copyright to. Preservation can be costly and it seldom generates immediate profits. Most corporations view things like preserving film reels and music tapes as a drain on their resources. This leads to carelessness or even outright destruction of what they deem valueless. The 2008 Universal fire is a dramatic example of what such carelessness can lead to.

The only bright spot is that there are ways to make copies of streaming film or music by recording it. The streaming services try to prevent it, but frankly you should record things. Record and make copies of everything you want to keep. In the future, piracy of such recordings might be the only way the works are still available. Pirates are often doing the preservation work that the actual copyright owners won't do.

There are plans from gaming companies to make streaming video games a thing, such as Google Stadia. And that is terrifying, for there is no way to make copies of a streamed game, for you won't have access to the code. A game that is only available via streaming will eventually be unavailable completely, for you won't be able to pirate it. The consumer won't even have any personal purchased to pirate.

There are existing cases of games that no one can play any more because of so-called always-online DRM. Video creator Ross Scott is probably the expert on this unfortunate phenomenon. He started with his video on the dead game Battleforge and his videos on this topic eventually culminated in his very long video essay on why "Games as a service is fraud". Go watch him, but I'll give a short summary of the problem here.

Games with always-online requirements require the player to have a connection to a central server in order to play them. This is in order to prevent piracy. And when that server is shutdown, the game is completely unplayable. Such cases are sobering hints of a future where artistic works can be lost forever due to corporate greed.

I don't think streaming media is inherently bad. It is a technology that can be used for good or for evil. Sadly, in the world as it is, it is a tool which enables corporations to further harm our culture in the pursuit of profit.

Yet, it doesn't have to be like this. If we use it with care, the internet and streaming can be used to improve access to art and culture, without harming its preservation. In a sensible world, the preservation of art and culture should be a task given to publicly funded institutions such as libraries and museums. They should be given all the funding necessary for such a monumental task.

And our artistic and scientific creations should be made as freely and as widely available as possible, including via the Internet and streaming. The arts should also be publicly funded instead of left to the whims of the market and the corporations which control it.

It may sound utopian, but such a world is entirely possible. Libraries already provide literature, art and education for free. This has enriched the lives of many who can not otherwise afford such things.
Classical music and opera in Europe are already heavily dependent on public funding. For if the market decided such things, we would not be able to hear Mozart performed live.

The creation of such a world will of course require serious reforms. We need the political will to take back our culture from the death grip of the market economy. We must reform copyright law, so it doesn't hamper the ability of libraries to provide digital materials. And it requires money, money that must be taken from those corporations that now control our lives and will fight fiercely to keep that control. It will be difficult, but if corporate rule is not resisted, they will eventually create a cultural wasteland. Fighting that hard struggle against them will be our only hope of preventing it.

Bellefleur by Joyce Carol Oates

Bellefleur is an novel by American author Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938), first published in 1980.

The novel is about the Bellefleurs,a wealthy American family of French origins. They live in a veritable castle in Upstate New York. But this is not merely realistic family saga, although it has elements of that, but a novel of supernatural gothic horror with a magic realist. Strange, obviously supernatural things happen to the family, which is said to be cursed. Their gothic castle mansion and the land surrounding is clearly a eldritch location of some kind. 

The bulk of the novel concerns itself with Leah and Gideon, the couple who lead the family somewhere the first half of the 20th century (Time is vague overall in this novel). Leah becomes pregnant with a child, who has obvious psychic abilities (which Leah share during the frightening pregnancy) among other peculiarities. The child who is named Germaine is implied to have been fathered by the cat Mahalalel, who is obviously not a cat, but a shapeshifting supernatural creature of some kind.  As a baby, Germaine telepathically convinces her mother to regain all the land the family founder Jean-Pierre Bellefleur once owned but which they eventually lost.

The novel also tells the stories of the extended Bellefleur family and has frequent flashbacks to their strange history. A running thread is the story of Jebediah, who in 1806 becomes a mountain hermit to find God.  But there are many strange persons with strange fates among the Bellefleurs. A man who just disappeared inside the castle. A spinster aunt who became a vampire after a love affair with european aristocrat. The man whose skin was made into a drum when he died. Jean-Pierre Bellefleur II who is haunted by irrational urges to commit murder. The girl who married a man who turns into a bear. Nightshade, the troll who becomes Leah's manservant. The land surrounding the castle is the hunting ground of a bird-monster called the Noir Vulture who is capable of stealing human babies. In the early 19th century, the wealthy Bellefleurs begin a feud with poor Varrell family. This culminates in a 1825 massacre which kills most of the Bellefleurs, including the founder Jean-Pierre and almost causes their line to go extinct.

 It's difficult to find a theme or even a plot that unites this long, sprawling and surreal novel. Oates herself has said that Gothic literature move us because it is rooted in how we psychologically and emotionally perceive the world. The supernatural elements in such stories mirror our emotional states or attempts to superstitiously explain a chaotic world Or in her words "we have known people who want to suck our life’s blood from us, like vampires; we feel haunted by the dead—if not precisely by the dead then by thoughts of them."

And such connections can also be made between our subjective experiences and the supernatural and surreal elements of this book. Indeed, the surrealism of the story reminds us of the chaos of our own world. The noir vulture is a symbol of our fear of nature and loss. Leah's supernatural pregnancy with Germaine has overtones of body horror which reflects the horror real-life pregnancies can inspire.

Afterwards, in a very interesting scene, Germaine is born as a "well-formed... baby girl". But growing out her abdomen is a "part of another embryo" with male genitalia, legs and its own abdomen. Perhaps a male twin half-absorbed in the womb by his sister. Her grandmother then cuts this male part away with "three skillful chops of the knife". This scene is very interesting from a gender perspective. It could symbolize how children are raised to "cut away" or suppress the parts of themselves that don't fit their prescribed gender role. Or more directly, the operations intersex children are subjected to after being born.

A recurring theme in the book are obsessions, which can entirely consume a person in a self-destructive manner, which in this book becomes literal. A boy becomes obsessed with a decaying pond until he eventually disappears with it. A man literally lays his soul and body into the clavichord he makes. He has an emotional affair with the Bellefleur woman he makes it for and the possessed clavichord becomes not only a symbol but a conduit for their relationship,

Oates has also said the novel is "a critique of America". And the supernatural horror of the book often mirror real horrors of American history. The Bellefleur castle itself is a symbol of inequality, proof that the class system of the old world has duplicated itself in the new, gothic castles and all. In a shocking scene reminiscent of historical violence in labour disputes, Jean-Pierre II lets his murderous urges loose on striking workers,

Ultimately, the cruel, greedy and monstrous nature of most Bellefleurs exemplify capitalism. Their greed and cruelty often leads to their own downfall, as in the climax of the book. The phrase, "The jaws devour, the jaws are devoured" is a mantra often repeated through this book that describes this. One of the final revelations in the story is that the founder Jean-Pierre Bellefleur through one of his many extramarital affairs fathered many of the Varrell family who would later kill him and most of the Bellefleurs in a massacre. Through his own unfaithful actions, he has literally created his own doom, a story his descendants would often repeat.

There is however hope. Many of the Bellefleur children have by the end of the novel left the castle and found happiness elsewhere. They thereby escape the frightening fate that befalls the castle and their parents in the climax of the book. For the author has a " vision of America that stresses, for all its pessimism, the ultimate freedom of the individual".

Bellefleur is a very good novel, if even if it can often feel sprawling and disjointed as a whole.  It can sometimes feel like a collection of short stories with no real overarching plot or theme to tie them all together, except the blood ties of the characters. But the sheer imagination on display and the strength of the writing in most chapters make for a engaging reading experience. That so many of the individual ideas are strong enough to be developed into their own short stories is ultimately a virtue.  And eventually connecting thematic threads can be glimpsed. The prose itself is a delight, with the story being told in beautifully long and complex sentences.

This is a novel that goes against the grain in almost every way. Fashionable literary taste has for almost a century dismissed supernatural horror and long sentences in favor of realism and Hemingwayesque minimalist prose. Joyce Carol Oates has however always rejected these dominant opinions and instead argued for the power of gothic horror and the supernatural in literature. It is a defiant stance that made me interested in her as an author.  And Bellefleur is despite its flaws ultimately a triumphant vindication of her belief in the gothic.