[Plura-list] Mashing the Bernie meme; Know Nothings, conspiratorialism and Pastel Q

[Cory Doctorow]

Today's links

* Mashing the Bernie meme: What if every video game, except Bernie with
mittens?

* Know Nothings, conspiratorialism and Pastel Q: What if it's all a big
fat lie?

* This day in history: 2006, 2011, 2016

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current
writing projects, current reading

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👽 Mashing the Bernie meme

The remix culture of the early 2000s left an indelible impression on me,
an enduring delight in the power of whimsy, juxtaposition, virtuosity
and ingenuity - and the ability of strangers all over the world to
collaborate without any explicit coordination.

The recent Bernie-mittens meme was a sterling example of this, tickling
me right to my core, and I just happened on an especially delightful
apex example of the form: Toasted Shoes's video of Sanders incorporated
into eight AAA video-games.

Toasted Shoes got Joe Mashups to create a 3D model of Sanders, then
tapped a bunch of different mashup artists to turn the Sanders sprite
into playable characters in the games, showing them off in a narrated video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tpIJx5pu4k

I'm not much of a fan of video-game streamers' narration, and I confess
that I found the video more entertaining without the narration, but to
each their own - Shoes was clearly enjoying himself, as were the
commenters on the video.

They had a lot to be pleased by.

Sanders as a Sith Lord in Star Wars Battlefront 2.

Two Bernie monsters in Fallout: first as a herd of trampling
beasts.

And then as "King Bernie," a looming, deadly giant of a level-boss.

Bernie gets matted into Resident Evil as every single monster, which
leads to much grisly hilarity in the cut-scenes.

The everybody-is-Bernie motif carries over to Skyrim.

And he reprises his role as a giant boss in Skyrim.

Giant Bernie makes a great Fallout level boss as well.

And in Devil May Cry, Bernie becomes a Clive Barker-esque demon.

But all that violence is cleansed with a gorgeous, relaxing underwater
Bernie in Abzu.

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👽 Know Nothings, conspiratorialism and Pastel Q

As the Qanon prophecies fail and the cult-members struggle to resolve
their cognitive dissonance, it's a good time to revisit the history of
paranoid, conspiratorial political movements in American history - the
"paranoid style" that has dominated since the Revolution.

After all, the very first skirmishes of the US war of independence were
based on a conspiracy theory: that the levy on tea was a prelude to a
sellout of the colonists to transnational mercantalist interests. US
politics have always been conspiratorial.

I found Zachary Karabell's Politico history of the Know Nothing party
especially useful, as it tells the story of what happens when surging,
paranoid, fractious political movements implode.

The American Party was a secret 19th century organization founded on a
conspiracy theory: that Irish immigrants were secretly planning a
takeover of the US on behalf of the Pope.

The American Party believed that the Irish were coming for their jobs,
and for the very culture that defined America. They circulated rumors
about nuns engaging in ritual infanticide and sex-trafficking teen
girls. The Qanon parallels are strong.

The American Party (later the Native American Party) started off in the
shadows. If anyone asked a member about the organization, they'd say "I
know nothing," which is how they came to be called the "Know Nothing Party."

The Know Nothings became a political force thanks to the vacuum left
behind by the implosion of the Whig party. The KNs promulgated
anti-immigrant laws that promised preferential access to jobs for
native-born Americans.

But the KNs were unhinged, riven by infighting, and, after a decade and
a half, they basically vanished from the American political landscape,
mostly absorbed into the new Republican party.

Their legacy is mixed - on the one hand, the simmering xenophobia
expressed as concern for jobs and culture on the right; on the other,
the roots of the trade union movement.

For Karabell, the Qanon colonization of the Republican Party is an echo
of the rise - and fall - of the Know Nothings, as a mix of
conspiratorialism, legitimate anti-corruption grievance, and xenophobia
triggers a collapse.

Dismissals of conspiratorial movements - for example, stories that blame
Big Tech's "algorithmic radicalization" mind-control rays for
conspiracism - treat conspiracies as being rooted in ideas, rather than
the material world.

That's a mistake - and it's one that gives conspiracists far too much
credit. Conspiracies don't take hold because Alex Jones or Marjorie
Taylor Greene are so good at explaining them that they cloud their
victims' minds and bypass their critical faculties.

After all, Jones and Greene are fucking idiots, not super-geniuses.

What they tap into - what predicts the rise of conspiracy - is
experiencing real conspiracies that hurt you and the people that you
love (another word for "real conspiracy" is "corruption").

A really striking essay about this is Snowden Stieber's "This Secret
Message Could Change Your Life!" - about evangelical Christianity,
wellness culture, conspiratorialism and "pastel Q" (the
Instagram-spread, female-coded Qanon flavor).

https://wisetendersnob.medium.com/this-secret-message-could-change-your-life-wellness-culture-jesus-and-qanon-cd576e53c9c8

I was especially struck by the connection between "alt-nutrition"
philosophies and conspiratorialism. The thing is, our food advice really
has been corrupt: as Gary Tabues wrote about in his 2002 New York Times
essay, "What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?"

https://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/magazine/what-if-it-s-all-been-a-big-fat-lie.html

Taubes describes how the familiar "food pyramid" that advised eating
lots and lots of carbohydrates while eliminating fats had been
bought-and-paid-for by Big Ag, and how that advice had triggered an
obesity epidemic.

Taubes's essay hit me square in the gut. I was a fat kid, with fat
grandparents, and a mom who'd fought her weight all her life. As I hit
my thirties, I was assiduously eating pasta and bread (with margarine)
and other low-fat, high-carb food, and getting fatter and fatter.

After reading Taubes, I switched to eating high-fat, high-protein,
near-zero-carb. After a couple weeks, all my cravings disappeared. A
year later, I was 100lbs lighter - without any additional exercise, on a
diet of steak, cheese, and cream lattes.

I've gained about 50lbs of that back in the intervening years, 20+ of it
in the past year. It's a source of real anxiety for me. I've got serious
body issues, weight-gain-triggered depression that I manage, even as I
exercise daily and count calories.

I couldn't keep up my all-steak diet - too much worry about my ageing
body and the roasting planet - but its lesson stuck with me:
corporations bought off the science of nutrition and made me miserable
for decades and decades.

As Steiber writes, the people who fall into Pastel Q have had similar
experiences: switching from the food and lifestyle choices that
corporations and governments promote, and experiencing life-changing
benefits.

The wellness movement isn't just a way for huxters to sell you
supplements: it's also a response to corruption in dietary advice,
driven by the commercial priorities of the increasingly monopolized
packaged food, fast food, and ag industries.

Likewise, the Q conspiracy about rampant, elite, unaccountable child
abuse is rooted in the real child abuse rings inside of "the Roman
Catholic Church, Southern Baptists, Independent Baptists, Kundalini
Yoga-centered 3HO, Shambhala Buddhism, Boy Scouts of America, college
football programs, USA Gymnastics, high school sports, police
departments, and US federal agencies."

Q may implode like the Know Nothings, but the corruption that gives
conspiracy theories explanatory power will continue to spur new
conspiratorial movements.

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👽 This day in history

#15yrsago Kerouac curator invents copyright laws to keep photographers
away
https://thomashawk.com/2006/01/open-letter-to-myra-borshoff-cook-tour.html

#15yrsago Table of newspaper mentions of of “fair use” and ‘copyright”
since 1993
https://web.archive.org/web/20060907172508/http://www.nyu.edu/classes/siva/archives/002732.html

#15yrsago EFF suing AT&T for helping NSA illegally spy on Americans
https://www.eff.org/cases/nsa-multi-district-litigation

#15yrsago MPAA puts TSA goon in charge of enforcement
https://web.archive.org/web/20060209035921/http://www.mpaa.org/press_releases/2006_01_31.pdf

#15yrsago Law firm fires clerk for personal opposition to DRM
https://web.archive.org/web/20060203030500/http://www.freeculturenyu.org/2006/01/31/drm-fired/

#10yrsago AMAZING slam poem about
policing women’s speech habits https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me4_QwmaNoQ

#10yrsago Batman: billionaire plutocrat vigilante
https://www.tor.com/2011/01/31/batman-plutocrat/

#10yrsago Escher/escalator mashup https://b3ta.com/board/10320990

#10yrsago Senate filibusters explained
https://web.archive.org/web/20110205081255/http://www.filibustery.com/

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👽 Colophon

Today's top sources: Super Punch (https://www.superpunch.net/), Naked
Capitalism (https://nakedcapitalism.com/).

Currently writing:

* My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and
reconciliation. Friday's progress: 522 words (105202 total).

* A short story, "Jeffty is Five," for The Last Dangerous Visions.
Friday's progress: 252 words (2395 total).

Currently reading: Analogia by George Dyson.

Latest podcast: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 29)
https://craphound.com/news/2021/01/25/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-29/

Upcoming appearances:

* Launch for the young adult edition of Edward Snowden's memoir
PERMANENT RECORD, Feb 9,
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/edward-snowden-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-136734968973

* Boskone, 58, Feb 12-15, https://boskone.org/

* Keynote, NISO Plus, Feb 22-25,
https://niso.plus/cory-doctorow-to-keynote-at-niso-plus-2021/

Recent appearances:

* Monocle Reads
https://monocle.com/radio/shows/meet-the-writers/monocle-reads-87/play/

* Hedging Bets on the Future (Motherboard Cyber):
https://play.acast.com/s/cyber/hedgingbetsonthefuturewithauthorcorydoctorow

* Applying the Pandemic Mindset to Climate Change:
https://hbr.org/podcast/2020/12/applying-the-pandemic-mindset-to-climate-change-with-cory-doctorow

Latest book:

* "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone
technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political
cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution
and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

* "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet
analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a
solution.
https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59
(print edition:
https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907)

* "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new
introduction by Edward Snowden:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies
here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

* "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime,
gender, and kicking ass. Order here:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed
copy here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1562/_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer.html.

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"*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla*" -Joey "Accordion
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